STEVE JANOSKI
When I drive through the heart of my state on the ever-chaotic Route 3 and the New York City skyline rises up in the hazy distance, it just doesn't look right without them.
I have never gotten used to the sight. At this point, I doubt I ever will.
The memories from that day are vivid — huddled around the cab of an old Chevy S-10 on our lunch period, listening to the car radio in astonishment as announcers caterwauled between updates on the Twin Towers and warnings about further attacks.
We may as well have been crowded around an arch-topped table radio listening to the first reports on Pearl Harbor as far as I was concerned.
"Jesus Christ," I said between pulls of a cigarette. "We're going to war with… somebody."
New York was our city, my city, the place I'd been brought every weekend since I was old enough to walk, and now it sat shrouded in a billowing fog of destruction that had been catapulted into the air as the ashes of firefighters and office workers mixed with the chalky dust of 220 floors' worth of sheetrock.
The psychological effect it all had on me was incalculable.
Ten years later, I suppose that gazing at that lacking skyline is the ultimate solemn reminder that nothing in life is permanent and that we are not all the heroes of our own movies.
Some of us go quietly, some gallantly, some with a whisper and some with a roar, but in the end, we all die, and every time it's a tragedy.
And sometimes the things we've built up around ourselves, our bridges and our skyscrapers and our countries, they die too — 9/11 taught us that much, and nothing has been quite the same since we learned that lesson.
And I don't mean that in the "9/11 changed everything!" way that some politicians do when they're seeking approval to invade this country or that country, but more that in 2001, America was robbed of its characteristic optimism, and without that, it seems to be hurtling toward a devastating end.
For years after 9/11, we turned into a crooked-back ogre, glaring with untrusting eyes and balled fists at every nation, a recalcitrant bully all too ready to call for war in the deserts of the Middle East or on the floors of our own Congress.
The scars are still there — now, a decade later, we are reluctant to help the people of the Middle East as they brawl in the streets for their own liberty, which we supposedly championed back then.
And 10 years later, we are not better off.
On the best of days, the country is going bankrupt, the infrastructure is crumbling, and our foreign wars are bleeding us dry. On the worst, we are told it's our last day on the job, that the rivers are rising, or that the bank is foreclosing.
Still, we have not learned. We call for war to prevent war, we build more to prevent flooding, we elect people who hate government to fix government; as a country, we seem in dire need of a logic class or two.
Sometimes, for all of our flight deck rhetoric about how we "stand strong" and "never forget," I wonder if Bin Laden actually succeeded.
Maybe, just maybe, he figured out that his strikes would foment a need for revenge that would so thoroughly consume America that it would recklessly charge down the path to massive debt and a crippled economy just for the chance to kill him, willingly suffocating itself in pursuit of "victory."
Maybe he knew us better than we thought — maybe, better than we knew ourselves.
Or maybe I've just lost that September 10 optimism I once had.
Email: janoski@northjersey.com
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