It was a crisp cool September day, one week into the new term at Norman Thomas, the momentous summer school experience behind him, a morning that made Emerson glad he was alive and living in the greatest city on earth; sunshine (warm enough to wear a t-shirt) clean air, and cosmopolitan. He got dressed, had coffee, walked down two flights of stairs carrying his bicycle to the front steps of his loft and out onto the streets of Manhattan. His route to work never varied; up Avenue A to 15th Street and made a left, then a right up Irving Place to avoid the traffic mess at Union Square and stop off at his mom’s apartment on 20th Street near Gramercy Park. He chained the bike to the fence (the doorman said it would be okay) and went upstairs to return a baking tray Mom said she needed for dinner next weekend for Rosh Hashanah September 18th. Finding Mom well, he left to ride to Park Avenue South, turned right, and arrived at Norman Thomas at 33rd on time, chained the bike to the school fence and went in.
Once in school, he moved his time card to the in-box and proceeded to his first class 7:52; forty-two minutes later, to the teachers’ cafeteria he would go for another cup of coffee and a buttered roll until 9:21 am; period three. He cleaned the chalk board and headed over.
8:51 am, he was standing at the counter about to pay Carol when he overheard the radio that stayed on all day, WINS 1010 news station:
“A plane has just crashed into the World Trade Center,” the reporter said. Carol and Emerson gave an ear.
“What happened?” asked Emerson as he poured milk into his coffee cup.
“An airplane flew into the Trade Center,” she replied nonchalantly, taking his change and ringing him up.
“A big plane?”
“They say a private plane.”
“Hope no one inside got hurt.”
“Yeah, right?”
Mom was home. Perhaps she was watching TV and could see what was going on. He carefully walked his coffee over to the ancient wooden booth in the corner and opened the accordion doors.
“Hi Mom; say, on TV do me a favor and flip through the channels to see if there is a bulletin about some plane flying into the WTC?”
She told him it was on all channels. She said it wasn’t a private plane; it was a commercial jet “…and there is smoke coming out of one of the towers. Oh -my -God!” he heard her exasperatedly say.
“What is it?!?”
“A jet just flew into the other tower!!!” It was 9:03 am. “Emerson, something bad is happening!” Outside the phone booth, Emerson could see half a dozen teachers stand to listen to Carol’s radio. Mom wanted to watch. “Call me back.”
Carol turned the radio up. Ms. Vole got on the public address system:
“I would like your attention. Teachers, stop what you’re doing. There is a tragedy unfolding in Lower Manhattan. The Twin Towers have been hit by two planes.” The students didn’t hear much else until the magic words “rapid dismissal” filtered through their minds. “Teachers, escort your classes to the exits.”
A middle-aged secretary rushed into the cafeteria in tears. Her son, she cried, was a stock broker in there she couldn’t get in touch with. Carol came from behind the counter to hug her.
A physical education teacher walked by prancing around the halls, livid, agitated.” Why aren’t they getting everyone into the basement?” he called out to anyone who heard. “Why are we still standing here?” He didn’t mention the two thousand students who were presently streaming out onto the streets. The gongs had finished sounding. On the streets, traffic was still moving. Here and there, police cars with sirens screaming rushed south downtown.
Emerson walked up the stairs to the ninth floor teachers’ lounge, the one facing southwest toward the two smoldering buildings. Inside there were many teachers glaring out the window at the chaos two miles away. Students still in the hall disobeying the rapid dismissal, in a frenzy of carnival excitement, were enjoyably being chased around the building by security guards
Perhaps Emerson was stunned; his colleagues gawked at him motionless at the window, unresponsive to their wails and cursing. These same teachers who had kept him out of their cliques for ten years; he wished them in the burning towers. What sympathy did they care to give Emerson about 3,000 dead in Taiwan’s earthquake two years earlier? “Where did you say you lived? Thailand? Isn’t that part of China?” This tragedy they couldn’t avoid feeling but Emerson wished they were closer.
Emerson had his mind on a despondent Canadian flyer, the latest in a chronic problem of Canadians invading United States air space inadvertently. This gentleman had a plan to die by friendly fire. The AWAC Airborne Warning and Control System had detected him immediately and led him back over the border. These were commercial jets the radio said had taken off from Boston International Airport. Impossible that they got this far undetected.
While Emerson’s colleagues scurried from floor to floor wanting to be close to each other and say their final goodbyes, just in case, hugging each other in mutual mock fear of an imminent attack, like the ones they had gotten used to seeing in the action films of Hollywood, Emerson had other concerns.
His first thoughts were of a U.S. government conspiracy; the ruling class wanted to seal the fate of American working people, he thought, now that they received such cognitive violent reactions to the domination plans of World Trade Organization and International Monetary Fund; it would be harder to implement without terrorizing the people first. Step one: Seal the workers means of livelihood. Step two: Paralyze them with fear of a foreign enemy. Step three: Empty the public coffers paying off corporate projects the people opposed. Enslave them once and for all by destroying unions, make them all part-timer workers without security or pension. Make them struggling people who have no time to organize resistance. This is what Emerson thought in the hour after the first plane crashed as the South Tower, then, in a ball of smoke, it toppled. Emerson kept his thoughts as the North Tower fell a half hour later.
Emerson saw the whole picture from the other side. The mounting consciousness-raising of populist progressives in the ‘90’s all came tumbling down. Already, Emerson was no longer able to speak out about any of the wild thoughts he had in his mind. Surely he would be called insensitive at best and a terrorist sympathizer, or worse, if he said a word.
It was such a common ruling class tactic; creating terror, forming foreign (or domestic) enemies. He had seen its aftermath first hand in Taiwan; the Chinese Communist threat, and then the Taiwanese workers, paralyzed, accepting a two-party system in a bloodless revolution; anything was better than terror.
When the Twin Towers came crashing down, so did Emerson’s aspirations of making a sustainable world for the children to live in, helping families gain safe work places and living wages, ultimately abolishing the wage system altogether. A jubilee was not on the capitalist menu.
Emerson wasn’t giving up though; he had to fight back, more now than ever. There was still some time, he thought. While the government used the attack as an excuse to set up blanket surveillance and militarize the police forces, there was still time. Over the next few days, with memorials popping up at Union Square and around the city, Emerson knew he wasn’t the only one with these same thoughts of hope and fight-back, but not against the Muslim targets.
As he watched replays on TV of the disaster from a dozen angles, except one, he did not think of giving up the fight. He spent more time on the streets in demonstrations against scapegoating Muslims. More union organizing was done in and out of school. To Emerson and the progressive community, it was a matter of who got to the dungeon door first, the workers or the CIA. The door would be opened, now, or closed forevermore. Emerson was sticking to the union; you couldn’t scare him.
All the classes in New York City were suspended until further notice to give staff time to work out ways of helping students cope with the tragedy. The Board of Ed. held closed meetings with city reps, principals and counselors to make plans.
After a day off, classes resumed Thursday. Most students were absent. Nothing was normal. Groups of student congregated outside the building talking to others, staring into space as dozens of emergency vehicles continued to stream downtown. The flag flew at half-staff. On Monday, the High School of Economics and Finance, students and teachers, were to report to Norman Thomas at 1 p.m. The schools located below 14th Street in Lower Manhattan remained closed indefinitely.
Each school in New York City strained to get back to normalcy. How do you address the needs of students after all this violence? "We just don't know what else they're going to hit," Emerson heard a student say. The terrorism was taking effect.
Children cried. Loved ones were obliterated. There was no closure, just open wounds and the task of cleaning up the rubble. Bin Laden’s family was whisked away, given passage back to Saudi Arabia; it wasn’t really in the news; no one noticed. Israeli offices in the WTC had the day off on September 11th but it was anti-Semitic to say so. The poet laureate of New Jersey, Amiri Baraka (born Everett LeRoi Jones) after reading “Someone Blew up America,” had his title taken away for saying so. Emerson could have been proud of his connection to the ones chosen to be protected, but he was just ashamed.
The ignorant followed the media and blamed Muslim terrorists, ignoring that Bin Laden was a U.S. CIA-paid operative from Saudi Arabian allies. Emerson saw folks crying on the streets, holding their heads low, cursing the Middle World, and justifying any U.S. government retaliation. It was so convenient. The angry eyes of laissez-faire colleagues, apologists for U.S. global domination, supporters of commercialism, defenders of sweatshops in the name of low prices, the outsourcing of pollution an workplace abuses, anti-immigrant forgetters of their own American heritage.
The hardest folk for Emerson to face were those who had family and friends that were collateral damage in the destruction. He couldn’t tell them what he knew was the truth. Each victim, to a fault, blamed it on Muslims, but Muslim students at Norman Thomas had their families under siege; parents taken from their beds in the middle of the night and put into detention cells somewhere in Brooklyn.
All open minds had to keep their mouths shut; Emerson was the exception. He had already been ostracized by the Jewish clique for not defending Israel and for defending Muslim students. He had been called a “dreamer” by the union chapter leadership for supporting grass-root collective decision making and inclusion in the chapter, a loose cannon at Teacher-Administrative meetings, anti-Christian by the Italian clique for not participating in Christmas.
Across the Western World, and especially in the United States, the doors of perception were being bolted shut, the outcasts cast out, wires tapped, internet followed, as flag pins started popping up on every suit lapel on TV news people.
