Morning after 9/11

Ten years ago to this very day, the skies over New York dawned in the hue of freshly forged gunmetal, stretching seemingly boundless in all directions and casting no shadow over the city’s many skyscrapers. It was a Tuesday. New Yorkers and visitors walked briskly, filling the sprawling city with vibrant, buzzing life. Then, without a warning, a shadow fell.

Before 9 a.m., right before the start of the workday, American Airlines Flight 11 emerged from the autumn sky and crashed into the World Trade Center’s North Tower. Stunned people looked up in disbelief. Just past 9 a.m., United Airlines Flight 175 slammed into the South Tower. The towers burst into flames and smaller shadows plummeted from the buildings – people falling to their deaths.

Meanwhile, American Airlines Flight 77 rolled low over the Arlington, Virginia landscape before throwing itself on the Pentagon. Then, a fourth plane, United Airlines Flight 93, rumored to be aimed at the White House, fell by itself into a Pennsylvania countryside.

Back in New York, the burning South Tower fell, followed by the North Tower as debris, bodies and flame rained over the city. A wave of smoke and destruction radiated from the buildings out into the nearby New York streets, engulfing fleeing cars and people in its path. From everywhere you turned, it looked like the apocalypse had unfolded in a day when the New York workday was mercilessly interrupted – and for so many, never to be continued.

The death toll was beyond comprehension. Almost 3,000 people died that morning – passengers, office workers, policemen, firefighters and other people just getting on with their everyday routine. The city looked like a man whose heart had been blown out, as entire sections had disappeared, razed to the ground or burned beyond recognition.

It was a sight duplicated on TV screens around the world, and the world stared back at the terrible tableau. It would turn out that madmen, perverting religion to their sinister purposes, had planned and executed this attack precisely to plant terror in the hearts of Americans and the world. It almost worked.

What the 9/11 terrorists did was take the ordinary and turn it into the lethal. This was what struck so deeply in hearts everywhere, that the hijackers took the everyday conventions of American life – commerce, transportation, lunch – and tainted it all with fear.

What happened instead was that the world understood that it had witnessed an act that was as truly, unmistakably evil as was possible in the modern era. It was an attack that could only be seen in the context of the blind hatred of men who seek to excuse inhumanity. It was not about Islam. It was not about the Middle East. It was about killing as many people as possible in a single day.

What happened instead was that the world looked at its own capacity for murder on a scale unseen since World War II – and it was horrified by it. As for the small men who took credit as well as congratulated themselves on being able to kill men, women and children who meant them no harm, they realized they had changed the world – but not in the way they had intended. Overnight, Osama bin Laden was the most wanted person on the planet and he did what all small men do when taken to task for what they had done: he hid.

Ten years later, Bin Laden is dead and the sentiment that arose from 9/11 has been diluted by America’s “War on Terror,” a war which took Americans to Afghanistan and Iraq where more lives would be lost. It was a war which touched even the Philippines, where the tracks of several terrorists had led, including those of Ramzi Yousef, who had bombed Philippine Airlines Flight 434 in 1994. Filipinos were horrified to find out that these evil men had moved freely among them – until 9/11. Even here, across the ocean, 9/11 changed us.

What happened was that the world swore this would never happen again. The Filipinos swore that never shall evil men as these find refuge within our borders. Aside from increasing vigilance across all borders and ferreting out the terrorists, the people of the world remembered the value of every single human life, regardless of race, class or creed. Instead of becoming terrified, the world learned to love again on 9/11. Today, New York has risen again and the rest of the world wakes up to a morning as bright and as endless as a future without fear.