Six o’clock. TV hour
Don’t get caught in foreign tower
Slash and burn, return
Listen to yourself churn

— john michael stipe

—

They say you’ll never forget where you were when 9/11 happened, and I guess it’s true. I was in bed asleep.

The phone rang. It was Ma. “Turn on the TV,” was all she said. This was the same woman who loved to tell me about Boris the Bat Boy and how chemtrails were being used to kill us. I told her it was too early; call later. But she said it again. So I did. And I saw it.

Then I pulled on a shirt, and possibly pants, and drove as quickly as I could to the newsroom. It was dark and empty, the way copy desks tend to be when the work day runs from afternoon till midnight. I started waking up my co-workers. “Turn on the TV and then come in,” I repeated time after time after time.

And so we spent the rest of that day, and the next, and the weeks to follow, telling a story that had seemed unimaginable just a day earlier. There are some days when the paper comes out and it’s the greatest feeling in the world, a sense of accomplishment, a pride in providing a snapshot of a moment in history. I remember I never felt it with these papers. Just a mixture of sadness and horror. A death toll that kept rising. A debate over the Falling Man photo. A dread of what might come next.

They said the world would never be the same again, and I believed it. But 25 years later, I realize that’s not really true. The world was never the same before this either. We have always had anger and hatred and a deep fear of anyone who looks different than us.

It seems like we have learned so little since then.

Twenty-five years, and here we are. A president who refuses to go to ground zero because they won’t let him give a hate-filled rant. A country fractured to the point that another civil war seems inevitable. And what do we do? We spend our days watching AI cat videos. Because, well, because they’re so damn cute. And they don’t kill anyone for no reason.

I always thought I would miss being a journalist. And sometimes I guess I still do. But I don’t miss those phone calls. Or that coffee.

And I’ll never get the photos from that day out of my head.

They still don’t know who the Falling Man was.

I fear he is all of us.