What if the Towers hadn't fallen?
I hate 9/11, like many people, not just for what happened in 2001 but for what we as the public are forced to sit through on every anniversary. CNN this morning is running a timeline of 9/11/01, “It’s 8:28am. On this minute five years ago, air traffic control sent out the alert that a flight from Boston had been highjacked and was on its way to New York airspace.” FOXNews, at the same time, replayed Bush’s speech from 9/14/01, the one on the rubble, the one that got our hopes up that we might have the right president for the task at hand. Meanwhile, the Today Show showed an interview of Bush filmed last Friday in the Oval Office that re-illustrated how not up to the task our president is. He jabbed Matt Lauer in the chest again and again, telling him, “It’s my job to make America safer. And we are safer. I’m not going to get into the interrogation techniques we use, that would only help our enemies adjust. Trust me, everything is legal. I run everything by our lawyers and the lawyers tell me it’s legal.”
While nothing about 9/11/01 can be undone, what’s nawed at me was the one thing that in retrospect didn’t seem inevitable but was essential in our understanding of how to respond, namely, the Towers’ falling. The images are indelible, but there was a lot of chance involved—where the planes hit, which floors had better fireproofing, how and where the fuel went. We know from bin Laden’s own words that he never expected the buildings of the Trade Center to fall—he expected painfully visible wounds. Imagine what, rhetorically, that might have become? Headlines in the weeks following may have read “America attacked, unbowed” or “Damaged Trade Center a symbol of resilience.” A year or two would have gone by, repairs may have been made, security would be ramped up, and slowly confidence—and businesses—would return.
Instead, America was humbled, physically and rhetorically, and remains so to this day. The related tropes of American industry and engineering, which terrorists understand and exploit better than we do, were brought low. For the first time in our history we believed our way of life could be destoyed without our ability to destroy our enemy’s way of life in response. We were—we are—scared but without the world-balancing fatalism that guided us safely through the Cold War. And after the comraderie throughout the autumn of 2001, we have acted our of fear, not of strength. Think of the strength, then, not to mention the lives saved, and think of what we needn’t have done in rage-filled response, had the Towers stood.
