9/11

Well it's that time of the year again, 9/11 or as us Brits like to call it 11/9. Many bloggers are putting up posts about this historic event 8 years ago today; it is so indelibly etched on our collective consciousness that it's almost a mandatory topic. I have a mixed memory of the day, of course I remember the anguish and the drama of the terrorist attacks, but it was also memorable for me because it was the day that my newborn son came home for the first time and my wife and I were so excited to be looking after him; learning new emotions and experiences at an exponential rate. It was doubly poignant for me because the company I worked for at the time had an office on Wall street (a few blocks from the WTC) and at that time I was shuttling back and forth to New York, my plan had been to be in NY that week and had it not been for my son being born I probably would have been staying in the Marriot at the WTC itself or possibly the Hilton across the square which is where I normally stayed.

Like everyone else I was glued to the news that day and watched with horror as events unfolded; my work colleagues and I desperately tried to contact our American friends and colleagues to make sure they were OK but it was dreadfully difficult, the phone system was severely stressed and most people weren't in the places they normally were. In the end our story was not a tragic one nobody I knew was killed or injured, at least not physically anyway.

I visited the site a few weeks later, my lasting memory was of the smell, anyone who has ever had a deep freeze full of meat defrost and sit festering for a month will know the kind of smell I'm talking about; we had to move the entire office up to Midtown after that, it was so awful. The other feeling I had was of the sheer magnitude and scale of the aftermath, the whole area looked like Godzilla had stridden through the place, taking swipes out of the buildings as he went.

The attacks also had a profound effect on me intellectually; combined with my new found responsibilities it made me seriously re-evaluate what I thought about religion and its place in our society. Many apologists would claim that these attacks had little to do with "real" religion and I wouldn't be so naïve to think that they were exclusively about religion, but religion was and remains an important and enabling component, when you have faith, anything is possible.