Anniversaries Are for Remembering

It is framed by airplanes.

On September 11, 2001, I stood with a bunch of other New Yorkers on a street corner on the Lower East Side, gazing up at the surreal sight of smoke billowing out of a gaping hole in the North Tower of the World Trade Center, and a cloud of what looked like glitter — shattered glass — floating in the sky around it. No one knew exactly what had happened, but talk was that a plane had hit the building. A small private plane, we assumed. An accident. Nothing else was conceivable, or crossed our minds.

Soon after, as we watched, a fireball erupted as a second plane crashed into the South Tower. Not a small private one, and not an accident either. Neither was the first, it turned out.

This week it was another airplane that dominated the news, the last US Air Force transport to fly out of Afghanistan as our bungled twenty-year war there came to an ignominious but necessary end. It was fitting, as our Afghan misadventure had of course been kicked off by that terrorist attack on New York and Washington twenty years ago.

When the Biden administration chose the symbolic date of September 11, 2021 for the end of US involvement in Afghanistan, I’m sure it did not have this sort of symmetry in mind.