I missed it by one day. On Sept. 11, 2001, I awoke to the news that two jets had flown into the World Trade Center Twin Towers. One day before, I had been in the World Trade Center.
On Monday, Sept. 10, I accompanied a close, dear friend to a doctor’s appointment she had in Manhattan. She lived in Orange, N.J.
We took a New Jersey Transit train from Orange to the Jersey City station. From there we hopped on a PATH train, which at the time ran from Jersey City, under a tunnel to Manhattan and ended at 42nd Street. (That was how we usually traveled from Jersey to The City. Why drive around Manhattan if you don’t have to?)
The first Manhattan stop for the PATH train was the World Trade Center. PATH trains and New York City subway trains arrived and departed at a terminal on the bottom level of the World Trade Center, where there were a plethora of shops and restaurants. (My friend and I were particularly fond of the Krispy Kreme joint.)
When I heard of the terrorist attacks the next morning, I was shaken by how close my friend and I had come. What if the appointment had been for Tuesday, Sept. 11? What if we’d had some time to kill and decided to go to the top to see what the view was like, since we’d never been there? You wouldn’t be reading this column, that’s for darned sure.
My friend and I returned to Ground Zero about a week later. Needless to say, we didn’t take the PATH train. As much as we didn’t like it, we had to drive into Manhattan.
We saw the photos of people lost in the WTC on Sept. 11, photos that relatives posted in some vain hope that their loved ones might still be alive. We’d already heard the news that Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda minions were responsible for the attack. After witnessing the destruction and agony of the attacks a week later, that’s when I decided to hang the American flag on my front porch.
It would stay there, I vowed, until Osama bin Laden was either caught or killed. And, quite frankly, I was hoping for the latter.
That wish was fulfilled earlier this year. A U.S. Navy SEAL team found him and smoked him in his secret Pakistan hideout. But the flag remains. There are other members of al Qaeda out there, all worthy of the same fate as bin Laden. So the flag will stay until they are all caught or killed, or until they say, “Enough. We quit. We will commit no more attacks on America.”
That, 10 years after 9/11, is at the top of my wish list of things I’d like to see as a result of that horrible day. The second is this: If we learned nothing else from 9/11, can we at least learn that we should stop whining about racial profiling?
This is what I heard yesterday on CNN: One of the commentators said he’s talked to the airline ticket agents who gave boarding passes to the terrorists who flew those jets into the WTC. The ticket agents said they had their suspicions about the terrorists and were reluctant to have them seated on the airliners. Why did the ticket agents allow the terrorists to board?
They thought they were either being racist or might be accused of racism. America’s “white guilt” crowd had gotten to these ticket agents. They didn’t want to feel guilty about being racist. Think about how much guilt they must feel now.
Examiner Columnist Gregory Kane is a Pulitzer nominated news and opinion journalist who has covered people and politics from Baltimore to the Sudan.
