Personal involvement, terrorism and 9/11
Saturday will mark the ninth anniversary of the September 11,
2001 terror attacks on the nation that killed nearly 3,000 people.
There will be hundreds of speeches, memorials and remembrances.
However, by the time Monday morning rolls around, most people will
have just filed it all away again until next year.
Those who lost friends, family or loved ones cannot merely file
it away
– their feelings will stay with them, most for life. There is
the invisible line separating those who feel a personal loss from
those who are merely onlookers – I call it the personal involvement
line, or the PI line for short.
Personal involvement, terrorism and 9/11
Saturday will mark the ninth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks on the nation that killed nearly 3,000 people. There will be hundreds of speeches, memorials and remembrances. However, by the time Monday morning rolls around, most people will have just filed it all away again until next year.
Those who lost friends, family or loved ones cannot merely file it away – their feelings will stay with them, most for life. There is the invisible line separating those who feel a personal loss from those who are merely onlookers – I call it the personal involvement line, or the PI line for short.
For me, the 9/11 PI line was two miles. My son was two miles away from Ground Zero coming out of the subway station going to work in lower Manhattan when the second plane ploughed in. The difference between those who never file it away and me was two miles, not close – but too close all at the same time.
If you’re on the outside of the PI line, forgetting may not even take until Monday because Sunday will be the first full day of the NFL’s 2010 season. The heartfelt songs, flags and missing-man flight formations will be behind most of us as soon as the kickoffs come.
That’s what happened with the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on February 26 1993, seven and a half years before 9/11 – we forgot very quickly. That day conspirators detonated a truck bomb containing 1,500 pounds of explosives under the North Tower of the WTC, killing six people and injuring more than 1,000. The plan was to topple the North Tower into the South Tower and murder tens of thousands of people; it almost worked. A small group, the families, friends and loved ones of the six dead victims, populated the dreadful inside of that PI line; it was not enough to arouse the nation.
Contemplate that for a minute. Nothing we did prevented or even mitigated that attack – we just got lucky. Had the bomb been closer to the foundation, 2/26, not 9/11, would be the fateful day and the inside of the PI line would have had many times more people than it does even now.
In some ways, the initial attackers were comically inept. One even went back and tried to get a refund on the rented bomb-carrying truck. In other ways, they were deadly serious using sophisticated chemical technology to boost the output of the weapon. We rounded several up right away and tracked others down, but not before the mastermind had bombed a Philippine Airlines flight killing one passenger and almost crashing the plane. Another lucky break, an apartment fire started by a careless terrorist, led to their capture and revealed a massive plot to bring down twelve airliners almost simultaneously.
The investigation of the 1993 bombing exposed a lot about the methods and madness of the terrorists; most of all it revealed their determination to commit mass murder. Convicted in 1998, plot leader Ramzi Yousef said in court, “Yes, I am a terrorist and I am proud of it. And I support terrorism so long as it was against the United States Government and against Israel, because you are more than terrorists; you are the one who invented terrorism and using it every day. You are butchers, liars and hypocrites.”
Had everyone – government and citizens – taken that more seriously, one cannot but wonder if later events might have been different. However, there was little chance of that happening because not enough people were personally involved. In 1993, fate and choice had put most of us on the safe side of the personal involvement line and we chose not to cross over – it was someone else’s problem.
Marty Richman is a Hollister resident.
