Twenty Years After Black Tuesday

A Personal Essay on Why I Wasn’t Shocked on September 11, 2001

“What would happen if an airplane crashed into a water tower?” This was a perennial question I asked as a boy whenever my dad drove past a water tower. I was curious and, when it became clear that no one in the station wagon could or would attempt to provide an answer, I kept asking. On occasion, someone would speculate. Mostly, I was teased for asking what must’ve seemed like an utterly preposterous question.

I don’t recall the impetus for why I asked. My boyhood was a time of social and cultural strife. My early years were dominated by radio and television reports of civil disobedience, rioting, disaster, terrorism and death. Among these were reports of plane crashes. America was at the peak of what was then referred to as the Jet Age. “Leaving on a Jet Plane”, a song written by the late John Denver, who later died in a plane crash (on an airplane he’d apparently built using a kit), was a popular, vaguely anti-industrial, lament. From Beirut, Lockerbie and Entebbe to Athens, Rome and…