Four years ago, I wrote a piece on my blog called, "Making Our Way Home from the World Trade Center." I am feeling even farther away from home now, in light of this month's appalling fall of Afghanistan. Afghanistan is America's gift to the same Taliban who nurtured and trained the 9/11 hijackers who made their way to us and felled the twin towers. What follows is a much-rewritten version of that essay.
On the early morning of September 11, now 20 years ago today, I was at Newark airport, right across the Hudson River from the World Trade Center. I was picking up my flight papers at the Concourse C-3 weather room, where the pilots did their pre-flight planning.
As usual, I had left my car at the employee parking lot F, on the south side of the airfield. When I parked there I always looked up fondly at the Trade Towers just across the marshes and the river.
I had lived in New York twenty years before, driving a taxi cab while a student, and I watched the towers going up a little every day. My feelings about those buildings were personal. I had a visceral affection for the awe-inspiring majesty of the structure and, as I learned more and more about sound economics, I came to harbor an intellectual appreciation for the activities of the many venture capitalists who toiled there in the towers above. I came to understand how this vibrant center played a central role in the global financial networks that served the creation of so much wealth in the world. I had also learned that relatively few people actually understand that these financial markets are not merely a bunch of paper pushers exploiting everybody else. But grasping the nature of financial markets is difficult for many because their work is so abstract and arcane, but this work is nonetheless crucial to directing the flow of scarce resources into those ventures that directly benefit everybody in the free world—and the freer the nation, economically, the greater the benefits.
Immediately outside the weather room where I stood, in the near distance, the Boeing 737 I was scheduled to fly was there at Gate 80. In the middle distance were the World Trade Towers, and my view of it was like being near the front of an auditorium, watching someone on stage.
I took a break and walked over to the Garden State Diner and ordered breakfast.
As is my wont, I sat at the counter of the diner with my nose buried in a book.
I vividly remember what I was reading—economist Russell Roberts’ didactic, yet touching novel, The Invisible Heart: An Economic Romance. The novel is about two academics in love, one of whom is a liberal progressive who believes that government control of things is vital to our well-being in life. Where the one character sees victims in life, the other sees victors and creative heroes. This other protagonist is a passionate champion of free markets and believes that government regulation tends to create perversely unintended consequences for almost everything it touches, and that the economic freedom of capitalism dramatically, stupendously supports peaceful, voluntary trade in the world, trade for mutual benefit, and thereby enables people to flourish better than any other system ever to appear in history anywhere in the world.
I kid you not! This is the truth! Such a nerd! Yet I was indeed reading Russ Roberts' book and I remember this fact as vividly as I remember where I was the day President Kennedy was shot.
Then I heard a woman cry out, “Oh my god, an airplane just flew into the World Trade Center!” I looked up and witnessed the first puff of smoke beginning to billow out of the north tower of the WTC.
I thought to myself that the jagged and bloody hole a big airplane would make on the side of that tower would be an ugly scar that might take months or even years to repair. More importantly, the tragic loss of all those poor souls who died in this accident would certainly leave behind bereft relatives and friends whose grief might never subside or heal.
But this awful event was already jangling my nerves, so I settled up for breakfast and went directly back to the flight planning room for my papers. My departure time was just an hour later and I needed to meet my crew down at the airplane.
As I stood at the window in the flight planning room, the second airplane blasted a mushroom cloud of fire and flesh and steel and glass out of the south tower.
At that moment, all the pilots in the room knew that these were no accidents, these were acts of terror.
Everybody there knew that our world was listing gravely towards a loathsome and dangerous ocean.
I stood with my colleagues, weak and stagnant with horror.
And then the south tower fell in a pall of smoke against that pellucid blue sky like an ugly smear of paint thrown against a beautiful painting by some stinking little punk.
I never imagined that there was the remotest possibility that one of the towers could ever collapse as a result of an airplane’s crashing into it.
Then the second tower collapsed.
The authorities closed the airport then and I joined a miles-long refugee column of dumbfounded, shattered, and woozy humanity, and, pulling my roller bag and flight kit, trudged the three miles back to my car at the far end of employee parking Lot F.
In the traffic jam of bewildered people that followed, I began trying to make my way home.
In a sense, like every decent person in the world, I am still trying to make my way home.
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2021.0911
985 words
