Lara Rabkin was In her apartment on the fifth floor of a six-story loft in Brooklyn on the morning of September 11, 2001.
“All of my windows were facing the city,” Rabkin recalled, referring to Manhattan. “I could see from the World Trade Center to the Empire State Building.”
When she looked out the window, Rabkin – who grew up in Santa Fe and was then in the middle of a decade in New York City – saw one of the towers of the World Trade Center in flames, smoke billowing into the sky.
“From the look of it, it seemed tragic at the time, but maybe normal,” she said. “Like a helicopter might have cut it off or something. It mostly melted. “
Rabkin called her father, who advised her to prepare for the worst.
“I was like, ‘He’s tripping, it can’t be that bad,” she said. “And while I was on the phone, I saw the second building explode.”
In a cracking voice, Rabkin added, “It still makes me cry.”
The tears of September 11th are never quite dry – not with Santa Fe residents like Rabkin, who saw it firsthand, or the tens of millions of people across the country who remember what the world was like inside one that terrible moment. The day weighs heavily on others too – still troubled about how it could have happened, why it happened and, in some cases, what has happened in all the days since that September morning.
Even 20 years later, Rabkin’s memories come back quickly.
As a net effect of what two terrorist-commanded planes could do in the largest city in the country, Rabkin recalls fighting the instinct to hide or stand in a doorway, as would an earthquake. But when the Twin Towers shook, she said she realized, “There was nothing to do and it was impossible to find out what was going on.”
Rabkin said she had begun a mental inventory of her friends’ locations and was desperately trying to contact those who might have been in danger – including another Santa Fean, her childhood friend Noranik Zadeyan, who is around five years old New York University dorm lived blocks from the towers.
She spent the next few hours on the roof with her neighbors, watching them.
“We were in deep, deep shock,” said Rabkin. “The news always said, ‘Don’t drink too much coffee or alcohol.’ I don’t even drink coffee and I drank coffee. It’s been a long day. That day lasted three days. “
Making the incredible believable
As the attack unfolded in real time on television and newsrooms across the country – including The New Mexican, a morning paper that quickly scraped up a noon edition that day – it made an effort to cover what people saw. It was the first attack on US territory since Pearl Harbor.
Headlines blared snippets of what little they knew:
“The death toll rises in the thousands as the US tries to control attacks”
“Waves of fear have put the nation on alert”
“FAA stops air traffic in the US”
“New York Begins Massive Bailouts”
When an official statement surfaced, it was this:
Nineteen terrorists from the Islamist extremist group al-Qaeda, founded by a Saudi named Osama bin Laden, hijacked four airliners and deliberately threw two of them into the upper floors of the north and south towers of the World Trade Center complex. A third went to the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. Passengers on the fourth hijacked plane – believed to have flown to the U.S. Capitol – stormed the terrorist-controlled cockpit, and the plane crashed in an empty field in western Pennsylvania.
Government officials said the attacks stemmed from hatred of the American way of life, capitalism and freedoms.
“Al-Qaeda hoped that by attacking these symbols of American power they would fuel widespread fear across the country and seriously undermine the United States’ standing in the global community, which would ultimately lead to its political and religious goals in the Middle East and in the United States Muslim world, “the 9/11 Memorial and Museum website explains the origins of the attack.
Not everyone accepted this statement.
Garnett Thompson was asleep on the couch in his aunt and uncle’s house on Putman Avenue in Brooklyn, about four miles from the towers, when his uncle came down the stairs to bring him the news.
When Thompson saw the TV coverage, he remembered turning to his uncle and saying, “It wasn’t an accident.”
Raised in a family of educated, politically active immigrants, he said the idea that the government would “do stupid things” to its own citizens was not new to him.
“People in shock will do whatever you tell them to,” Thompson said. “So if you wanted to introduce shock syndrome into a culture … you have a massive traumatic event and then you come up as a first responder and say, ‘You don’t need Amendment rights here, you don’t need to know what happened to your Muslim neighbors .
There would be a lot of skepticism and accusations in the coming days and years – and not just for Thompson, who now lives in Santa Fe and works in a medical marijuana dispensary.
But immediately after the attacks, Thompson recalls, “It was like you were standing on a bell and someone was ringing. You couldn’t escape the presence of the event. It was all.”
Rabkin said not long after the towers fell, posters of the lost and missing were hanging all over downtown, and piles of flowers piled against the fences that surrounded the smoking heap of rubble where the twin towers had stood.
“There was a moment when it felt very connecting,” said Zadeyan, Rabkin’s Santa Fe friend. “There was something really nice about this vulnerability and being together, but then there was each other’s hatred and guilt.”
The blame, Thompson said, lies with the Muslims. “It got really tricky for a lot of people on the street,” he recalls. “I’ve seen people get beaten up. I’ve seen women have their hijabs taken off.
Three weeks after the attacks, President George W. Bush addressed a joint session of Congress. He blamed the attacks on bin Laden and al-Qaeda, which ran training camps in Afghanistan and was supported by the Taliban, an Islamic group that ruled the country.
The US government insisted that the Taliban hand over the terrorists immediately and close training camps or face a US attack. When the Taliban refused, Bush launched a global “war on terror” that was directed against Afghanistan but soon centered on Iraq.
For the next two decades, US forces fought, bled, and died in the region. America’s time in Afghanistan ended abruptly last month when the Afghan military failed to hold a country the US had supported for two decades.
The cost for a day
Although the attacks were largely viewed as al-Qaeda against Americans, the 2,977 people who died that day came from 93 nations, according to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. And in many ways the wars that followed were global wars.
But when support for a war on terrorism rose in the days and months after September 11, it quickly fell. According to the Pew Research Center, 79 percent of adults said they flew an American flag after the attacks. One month after the strike, 60 percent of the federal government expressed their confidence – a level not reached since the Vietnam era.
But confidence, according to the Pew Center, has declined since then and has remained relatively low for the past two decades. In April, it found that only 24 percent trusted the government “almost always or most of the time.”
This feeling of ambivalence persists even if those who experienced September 11, 2001 remember the shock, the finality, the uncertainty.
“Fear is the weapon we should worry about most now,” wrote Los Alamos’ Ellen Walton, who was also in Brooklyn 20 years ago. “Fear of people who are not like us, fear of disease, fear of healing, fear of the government, fear of our neighbors. Fear turns into hate, and if we hate, the terrorists win.”
For his part, Peter Locascio, a native New Yorker who now lives in Torrance County, NM, said he never blamed the country’s leaders for entering Afghanistan after the attacks.
“I don’t see an American conspiracy,” said Locasio, 60. What I see is business and political [groups] willing to make hay on that thing’s back to advance their own interests. There were people in politics and business who saw this as a great opportunity.
“I don’t feel any less safe,” he said. “But I don’t feel safer.”
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