Prelude (NYE 2000)
It was December 31, 1999. I was at Times Square with my younger sister Vanessa. I had been determined to be at the biggest New Year's Eve party in the world for the beginning of the new millennium, and thanks to Vanessa's mom, who worked for an airline at the time, we were able to get a couple of standby round-trip tickets to fly up on December 31 and fly back on January 1. This was basically a situation where we'd have to go to the airport for the early morning flight and hope that we could get a seat. We lucked out and got seats, landed in New York, and proceeded to try and find our way to Times Square on the subway. Everybody we stopped and asked for directions was very kind and courteous. They all stopped, listened, and responded completely before walking away again. The myth of unfriendly New Yorkers is greatly exaggerated, at least in my experience. People seem to be a lot less friendly, and a lot more fake, in Miami. Anyway, the only problem was that it seemed that everybody we asked gave us a different way to get to Times Square!
Eventually, we made it and got through the barricades to get a spot a few blocks back from where the big ball would drop. We were by the old TGI Friday's and McDonald's. At some point, we were getting hungry, so we decided to eat at TGI Friday's, knowing there was a risk of losing our spot in the crowd. Vanessa couldn't finish her burger, so she asked for a to-go bag. I protested a bit, arguing that she would have to carry it the whole time. She insisted, and back we went, only to be stopped by an NYPD cop who was not letting us back in through the barricade. Right on the spot, I made up a story that our mom was diabetic, and she was waiting for us to bring her food (I motioned to Vanessa's leftovers). Immediately, the cop let us through, but he warned us that we were not allowed to leave the crowd again. A little while later, Vanessa told me she really needed to use the bathroom. I reminded her what the cop had said, but she couldn't hold it anymore. I think I told her to take the leftovers with her and tell the same story about a waiting diabetic mom and hope she got a different cop! She ended up going to the McDonald's restroom and was able to get back without a problem (I'm not sure if she had to use the story)!
Standing in that Times Square NYE crowd for many hours, my lower back started aching badly. It was a cold winter night in New York City, with the temperature reading 47 degrees F on one of the displays. I was thinking that this is a great event to experience... ONCE! I'm blessed to have gone to the most significant one of my lifetime: the dawning of a new year, new century, and new millennium all at the same time! The Y2K fears leading up to this day were prominent on my mind, as well, though. My fear of a potential terrorist attack on Times Square or worldwide blackout was significant.
The big ball dropped without a hitch and everyone rang in our own Happy New Year. They had been doing the hourly Happy New Years around the world from each time zone, and they had announced that they were going to continue doing each hour across the four U.S. time zones and beyond throughout the morning hours, but right after midnight, the Times Square crowd started dispersing, and there were no signs that there was going to be a continuing party. When midnight hit, and everybody was wishing each other a Happy New Year, there was a pretty young woman standing in front of me. To this day, I feel like I could have given her a New Year's Kiss, but I hesitated, the moment passed, and I did nothing. Ah, to be young again... and a bit bolder!
After the big ball dropped, Vanessa and I walked around looking for a place to eat. Not far from where we had stood, we found this huge, multi-level deli that was open and packed, so we ate there. I've wondered what deli that was, but I haven't been able to get that information. I certainly don't remember the name. After we got our fill, we began to ponder where we would rest our weary heads. The plan was... there was no plan! We basically just started walking around looking for any hotel with an available room. One of the hotels we stopped at, the front desk clerk refused to rent us a room. He told us, in so many words, that a grown man with a 12-year old girl, looking for a hotel room after midnight, was a bit suspicious. I insisted she was my sister, but he wasn't budging. For those who believe in karma, I suppose this was payment for the diabetic mom lie I told earlier to be let back into the crowd. Vanessa and I walked out of the hotel, dejected, and I started to seriously consider that we might not be able to find a hotel room anywhere and would have to essentially wander the streets all night and into the next day!
We came across another hotel, and I had an idea. I told Vanessa to wait for me outside, and I would go book the room by myself, to avoid a similar scenario where the front desk clerk might not believe that I was traveling with my little sister and refuse to book us. This plan of mine was far from the ideal scenario, as it would necessitate me sneaking my sister past the front desk clerk after having booked the room for just myself. One can imagine how much worse it would look in their eyes for me to be caught trying to sneak a preteen girl into my hotel room and how much easier it would be for them to believe that I was up to something nefarious instead of us being just a couple of siblings desperate to finally get some rest! Not only that, I also had to leave my little sister by herself outside a hotel in New York City in the middle of the night while I went to book the room. Fortunately, it all worked out. I booked the room and managed to successfully sneak my sister past the front desk clerk. When we got to the room, we found it to have a single twin mattress bed and a shared hallway bathroom. Great! Of course, I let my sister take the bed, and I agreed to take the floor in exchange for the one pillow. I figure it was a fair enough trade.
The next day, we woke up, not necessarily well-rested but glad that it wasn't worse. After all, we could have ended up having to sleep on the street! We were flying back on New Year's Day, so we didn't have a whole lot of time before we had to head to the airport to catch our plane home. We started brainstorming on what to do with the limited time we did have, figuring we would probably only have time to visit one site or attraction. I came up with what I thought was a brilliant idea. Let's go to the World Trade Center, I said. We can go to the observation deck at the top of one of the towers, and from there we can see most of Manhattan, all in one fell swoop. So, that's what we did.
After visiting the World Trade Center, we stumbled on a Miami Subs restaurant, which we thought was hilarious. We entered and told the man behind the counter that we were visiting from Miami and thought it was cool to see a restaurant from Miami in the middle of New York City. He actually ended up treating us to our meal, which we thought was very nice of him.
On the train ride to the airport, I remember sitting across what I now remember as a Sikh man with a backpack on the floor between his legs. Although we had made it to the other side of the Y2K scare unscathed, I thought how the man with a turban and a very stern look on his face might be a terrorist. Later, once we got off the train, I thought back and chuckled to myself at my own ignorance...
The Day (9/11) and Aftermath
In the fall of 2001, less than two years after New Year's Eve in Times Square, I was beginning my first semester back in college after a five-year hiatus, pursuing a degree in theatre performance, having decided that if I was going to go back to school, I was going to study something I actually would enjoy rather than something based on its career prospects. The fall semester was just getting underway at Florida International University, and on Tuesday, September 11, I didn't have a class until the afternoon. Because of that, I had stayed up late the night before and was sleeping in that morning when I was woken up by a phone call from my friend Jimmy. I was still groggy when he told me something about a plane hitting the Twin Towers in New York City. I dismissed it as a terrible accident and went back to sleep, figuring I would find out more about it later on when I woke up. Just a few minutes passed, and my phone rang again. On the other end was my girlfriend at the time. She was crying frantically saying we were under attack. By this time, the second plane had hit. I turned on the TV and saw the images of the two towers with smoke billowing from the gaping holes. All classes at FIU were canceled, and I picked up my girlfriend to go eat at a Chinese buffet. For some reason, I wanted to just get away from all of the news coverage of the attacks and supposed that the Chinese restaurant would probably be a good place for that. But I remember the anxiety of everything that was happening led me to eat so much that I ended up having to go to the restroom and throw up. I learned then that there would be no escaping the aftermath of 9/11.
In the days following the attacks, I remember how eerie it was to see the sky empty of any airplanes. It was at that time that I realized how ubiquitous airplanes are in our everyday lives and how strange it was not to see any flying. I also thought how all this was probably going to lead to a terrorist invasion of the U.S., forcing us to go live in the woods. Of course, the planes eventually returned to the skies, and nobody went to live in the woods that didn't want to. The professor of the class that was canceled on 9/11 directed a tribute performance by the students in his class. I played a song I wrote in honor of the victims of the attacks as part of the tribute. That was my contribution. Just like the deli my sister and I visited near Times Square, though, I don't remember the song at the FIU Theatre 9/11 Tribute, and I'm not sure our performance was ever recorded.
25 Years Later - What Next?
The 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks was just a few days ago as of this writing. Every year, I think about that day, but I must admit that something about this anniversary made me think about it more than previous years. As the years go by, I think more and more about 9/11 from the perspective of my middle school students, all of whom were obviously not born when it happened, and how every year, that time distance grows ever longer as that day fades further into history. I think about the connection those of us who lived through it have and how each year there are fewer and fewer of us. I can imagine that no amount of documentaries, books, or Instagram Reels the younger people of today see about 9/11 will ever come close to conveying the sense of horror, fear, and uncertainty that we who lived through it felt. I still use 9/11 as an example when teaching my students about the difference between a primary source and a secondary source in history class. My sister Vanessa works for TSA, a federal agency that was created in the aftermath of 9/11 to improve airport security screenings, although for many, including admittedly myself sometimes, it's just another factor adding to the stress of all you have to deal with when traveling.
Now, where do we go from here? The lines at TSA are just one of the ways that 9/11 still echoes today. But in some ways, we are facing completely new challenges that are seemingly unrelated or unconnected to that fateful day a quarter century ago. Things like the rapid development of AI and the deepening economic inequality in the years since the financial crisis of 2008 and the COVID pandemic of 2020. But are some of these things we're dealing with now really that disconnected from those terrorist attacks? Can one not see in the middle-aged leaders of the various major tech companies the faces of scared little boys two and a half decades ago, staring at the two towers burning on their TV screen, traumatized in unimaginable ways by those events? Is it hard to fathom that all this maneuvering to construct a techno-fascist surveillance state in their attempt to achieve AI dominance is just their traumatized boyhood minds attempting to make their world as impervious as possible to future terrorist attacks? After all, they heard the wise old men on the television all those years ago talk about how we could have avoided the 9/11 attacks if only we had better ways to track those who want to do us harm. They saw as lawmakers passed laws severely curtailing our civil liberties in the name of greater security. Is it that hard to imagine that the moment those scared little boys saw those towers crumble they vowed, if only to themselves at the time, that they would dedicate their lives to making sure that the technology to track our every move would be created and deployed to make sure nobody could ever repeat these attacks ever again? It could indeed very well be that the loudest echo from 9/11 may be yet to come, unfolding not in the sudden explosion of a commercial jet slamming into a skyscraper, but in the slow evolution of a society that never quite came to grips with how to process the horrific events of that beautiful sunny morning all those years ago.
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