The Two Towers

Or The Wanna Be Grows the Hell Up

I awakened at nine in the morning when the phone rang. I picked up the receiver and croaked a groggy hello.

"Turn on channel 42 right now." It was the wife. She works for the Association for Retarded Citizens. She spends three days a week in a group home taking care of three little old ladies.

I stumbled into the living room and turned on the tube. It took a moment to register the image of smoke billowing out of a gaping hole in the side of one of the World Trade Center twin towers.

"Fuck!"

I usually curse like a sailor on fire. But there is a time and a place for everything and the situation clearly called for expletives.

The destruction of the World Trade Center is a wake-up call for the nation. The world is a dangerous place and we still live in it. Like it or not, this sort of thing can happen in America. And people wonder why I often retreat into a world of fantasy.

I could go on about how sickened I was with the correspondents of MSNBC, CNN and others who simply could not mask their glee at reporting the biggest story of the millennium, but I won't. I won't bore you with description of the carnage, the horror, and the raw emotion. How MSNBC kept showing that one guy blowing his nose in the street after getting caught in the dust cloud. The New Yorker spirit in the face of adversity. "This is the awfullest thing that has ever happened."

I will comment on the commonly drawn parallel drawn between this incident and Peal Harbor. My brother teaches history in a high school near Rochester, New York. He shared with me how he put this all into perspective for his students. Pearl Harbor was the first attack on American soil? No. The Hawaiian islands are 2,400 miles from the United States mainland. Hawaii didn't become a state until 1959. It was only a territory on the day that lived in infamy. Pearl Harbor was also a military target. While any loss of life is terrible, military personnel at least understand their lives are at risk. It's in the job description.

The World Trade Center is in New York City, one of the oldest cities in the Untied States. An important city in defining America's culture and personality. The twin towers themselves are one of the nation's most recognizable landmarks. And they were filled with offices. It's known as collateral damage. Civilian deaths.

The World Trade Center bombing isn't at all like Pearl Harbor. Not by a long shot.

It's much, much worse.

As of this writing, the death toll has not been tallied nor do we know who masterminded this catastrophe. We may never know who did this. For all I know, Tyler Durden leapt from the pages of Fight Club to bring his war on society to the real world. In the end, it doesn't matter who did it. What matters now is how I react to it.

I'll be honest. I've been to the World Trade Center. I've been to the top of one of the towers and even walked the catwalk on the roof. Breathtaking view.

I hated it.

I never cared for heights. The floor-to-ceiling windows on the observation level made my knees weak. The roof was worse because the wind is powerful at that altitude and you can feel the building swaying. I was gripped by an unreasoning terror that at any time the whole thing could topple to the ground.

Fear becomes reality.

But I miss the World Trade Center. You start to count of certain things. The sun comes up in the morning, the snow falls in the winter and the World Trade Center is a part of the New York City skyline. My faith is now shaken.

But the truly disturbing thing is in prime suspect numero uno Osama Bin Laden and his war on the big bully of a nation, The United States. What seems like a lifetime ago now, I had written a brief piece before this column became an official feature here on G.O. in which I expressed a level of sympathy for the school children who had been bringing guns to school. I'm not backpedaling on my statements then nor apologizing for them aside from the fact they were very poorly written. What I am saying is I no longer agree with that whiney, angry, bitter putz I once was.

We don't know if Bin Laden is responsible or not, but it's easy to believe that he could be. I could see his point, I guess. Most of his beef is about the Palestinian-Israeli War and the United States' role in it. Perhaps we shouldn't be backing Israel as much as we do.

Before I get jumped on for being anti-Semitic, let me explain. Was the Holocaust tragic? Absolutely. Should've post World War Two Germany been made to pay for that atrocity? Definitely. But giving the Jews the so-called promised land back? Come on.

My family moved around a lot when I was a kid. Probably the last house I felt truly at home in was a house in Spencerport, New York. The people who purchased it from my father have fixed it up real nice. New siding. They even raised the roof so it now has a full second floor now. Imagine I went to that house and knocked on the door and said, "Hey there. I used to live here. I've had some really good times here. I'm moving back in now. Get the hell out."

I can understand the frustration, but crashing an airliner into a crowded office building is a cowardly act as bringing an arsenal to your school is also cowardly. It's like a child throwing a tantrum. "Because you won't give me what I want when I want it I'll take something away from you."

Before I hung up the phone on Tuesday morning my wife said, "I hope it's alright. I haven't seen the World Trade Center yet." Three hundred people trapped on airplanes with their murderers and another ten thousand on the ground couldn't bring me to see the real tragedy. But the loss of the view, the fact my wife will never see it nor chide me for cowering as far from the window as possible has.

I've matured quite a bit. But I still have a long way to go.