A Day of Terror

Tuesday, September 11, 2001

I'm writing this just 30 minutes before Bush is supposed to address the county tonight at 8:30 PM. It's been such a long, crazy day, the most surreal I've had, ever. At times it seems like I'm dreaming, but then I think that no dream could be quite this crazy. So I'm not sure what I'm doing now, but I'm going to write down what I'm thinking, if for no other reason than that I want to reflect on it later. Here's how it began:

This morning I was watching the Today Show. About 8:45, Matt Lauer cut off his guest, and said they have some footage from the World Trade Center. Nothing came up, so Lauer apologized and cut to a commercial break.

At this point, I turned off the TV and headed to the office. I arrived a little after nine, and I immediately started to set up the TV that's been sitting on my office floor for the two weeks since my move across the street. Before I can turn it on, I'm called into a meeting with the architects who are designing the new DNC headquarters building. An hour and a half later, I walk out to chaos in the streets. It was only after I got back to my office that I found out what had happened.

I was shocked that no one came to pull us out of that meeting and let us know what was going on. As I'm walking out of the building, I run into the DNC's chief legal counsel, who asks, "Eric, is is true they've ordered an evacuation of the building?" "Joe, what are you talking about?"

The rest of the day was what you might expect. The DNC wanted a statement put up on the web, so I had to stay until that went public. The office was a bit of a mad-house: there was so much to do and so little time to do it in. And in the background, there was that image being replayed again and again of the second plane crashing into the tower.

I left the office about 3:30, one of the last people to leave for the day. As I left the office, my part of DC seemed like a weekend: no traffic, no people. The only difference was the presence of all of the police at the intersections, and the traffic flares lining the streets.

As I walked to my car, I could only think of the tens of thousands of people who probably died as the twin towers collapsed. And then I thought about the other disasters that cross my monitor (or more generally, newspaper front pages) several times a year: South American mudslides, Turkish earthquakes, and so on. I thought about how those numbers mean so much more now that they represent the deaths of my friends and neighbors, however distant they might be.

I was amazed at how many people my friends and I had to call to check in with. My friend David has family in NYC. My girlfriend Sarah has family in Manhattan, friends that work at the World Trade Center. And not just that, but the people that I had to call to assure them that I was OK. I kept thinking that I was just on the periphery on all of this, but I was closer to the center than I thought.

So I talked to my father. I talked to my cousin who was in town on business, and canceled our Wednesday lunch plans. I talked with friends from back home. I talked with old friends from days gone by. I was glad I did, since I don't talk with them often enough.

And then Bush came on. He claimed that today's disasters were due to people who hated the US as a "beacon of freedom." As if what we just experienced was due to an abstract philosophical disagreement, and not a concrete policy difference. Why does Bush feel the need to shield us from the reality of today's events? Do tens of thousands of lives lost not buy us entry to the truth from our selected leaders? Apparently not.

Time for another beer, and time to reflect some more. Tomorrow will be another long day. Until then…