There are moments in history that those who live in the after cannot fully understand the shift from the before. I know when I was growing up learning about historical events, we focused on the what and who, but never the then what. Reflecting on the events of September 11, 2001 as one who lived in the before brings this home.
Watching clips and remembrances reminds me of what the world was like before the Twin Towers came down. Before planes hit buildings and we learned that hijackers might turn airplanes into missiles. I grieve that world because I remember it as a time when we felt safe or at least truly free. But the after was a seismic shift in both culture and the American church.
On September 11, 2001 I was with several others from my company at a global trade show in Chicago. We had attended a private party at the House of Blues the night before in which my roommate for the trip was downing two Wild Turkey and 7UPs every time I saw him. I was enjoying the incredible music but thinking I may not get any sleep based upon his being several sheets to the proverbial wind. I was right.
When we awoke on Tuesday morning, I called my wife who told me a small plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. I turned on the TV and my roommate sobered up pretty quickly when we saw the second plane hit live. We went down to breakfast and my boss tried to get us to work and complete a planned visit to investigate a software package. We of course could not stay on task. We decided to check out of the hotel and start home in our 11 passenger rental van. There were ten of us, but then we remembered that three more were flying in that morning. We also wondered if they would be able to make it to Chicago. They did, they later told us they landed and the pilot immediately came on to let everyone know that planes were being grounded nationwide.
The arriving crew was asked to wait at Midway so we could pick them up to head home. One of them however, hopped in a cab to go straight to the trade show that was of course closed. There is always one who doesn’t listen. We eventually got everyone crammed into the van and headed home. We did not have smartphones and cell service was spotty and almost unusable so news was hard to come by. We did get reports throughout the day as we were concerned about our coworkers in New York as well as many of our customers - most of whom were NY based magazine publishers. It was a day that I still remember things vidvidly.
I remember the initial unity in the country, but we could already see cracks. Jerry Fallwell and Pat Robertson blamed the attacks on the sin of the nation and warned that we were only seeing the beginning if we did not repent. Another reason the outrage over comments by Jeremiah Wright from white evangelicals always irritated me. But things were still in that moment between the before and after.
When the after became real for me was November of 2001 when I made my first trip to New York following September 11. My boss had been a few times in the previous months and told me to expect the city to be kinda back to crazy, but still quieter. The plane to Baltimore was almost empty which felt weird. The Amtrak train was almost normal, but not quite the midday passenger count from before. That was all jarring, but then I arrived at Penn Station and made my way up the corridors to the street. The halls were lined with posters of the missing. It was the wallpaper of 2001 and the sorrow of it hit me like a rushing wind. It was a long walk through that grief to the street.
I exited at Seventh Avenue and turned to walk toward 27th street where our office had recently moved from upper Midtown and a move from Cranford, NJ. The emptiness of the downtown skyline was the second nail in the coffin of before. But it was the FDNY fire hall on the block of our office that was the final nail. The gifts, memorials, and flowers made the firehall look like a Rose Parade float. The colors only heightened the grief emanating from the building. I learned from our NY group that two full shifts were lost from that fire hall. Men and women who ran to danger and never came home.
The after become ugly. We are still living with the consequences of the decisions made in the after. The idea that violence can cure violence became our true belief. We blamed innocents for our pain simply because of where they came from or who they worshipped. Security became important enough to give up freedoms as long as we weren’t the explicit target of the ones securing the homeland. We did not heed the warnings that we could easily slip into prejudice and hatred.
I believe that the reasons white evangelicals so easily set aside their values concerns in 2016 has to do with a dream of returning to the before. But that isn’t happening. The hatred sown in the early after is exploding in the now. I fear the seeds we sowed are bearing the fruit of fear and hatred now. It is the evidence of trauma of a shifted world. I pray we can allow ourselves to be healed, but we seem all too ready to plunge headfirst into the result of fear rather than love.
I don’t have any good answers. But when I see my Haitian brothers and sisters stripped of protections and returned to a violent and chaotic country I grieve. When I hear fellow Christians spew hatred toward Islam, Judaism, and any religion other than ours I grieve. When fellow pastors tell me we can’t love “those” people I grieve. When ignorance and fear masquerade as intelligent discernment I grieve.
I continued to travel to New York City until 2006 when I left that company. I absolutely love NYC and miss it. I never visited what was then still Ground Zero. It first felt like gawking although our CEO had visited and shared with me the prayers he gave there. As things began to change at the site, I just could not bring myself to go there. But I miss the anchor that the towers felt like in the before. I really do hope we can redeem the after into beauty.