21 years have passed without me saying much
Every year September 11 rolls around. It is a severely bad time for me, so much so that I don’t even acknowledge it. This year, maybe because my children (born after the event) asked more pointed questions, or because I happened to be in England on the day, so colleagues were talking about it, I found myself speaking up a bit and to even sitting still to listen to others. I appreciate many of the sentiments expressed by friends and colleagues who were also in downtown Manhattan on the day mass murderers flew into town unannounced.
One thing about those comments - many of them referred to the sense of unity and collective purpose they observed in the days following. Having walked away over the bridge back to Brooklyn covered in ashes, I too got an initial sense of unity in New York. It for the most part stayed, but one moment on 13 September stands out for me. I was walking around downtown, still shocked, still stunned and seeing what everyone else was doing. It was really quiet. I'd walk entire streets and not see anyone.
I cannot remember the exact street I was on, but it was somewhere in the West Village. I looked up and there, stretched across three windows was a sheet which had been painted with the words "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind."
Beyond enraged, I search around until I found a chunk of cement a block away in an alley. I came back and threw it through the window. It made a lovely crashing sound.
I stood there, waiting for a reaction, burning to engage in further back-and-forth with the idiot who wrote that and put it up while the stench of burning flesh was still wafting into my home in Brooklyn Heights, but none came.
May 2nd is a day of celebration for me; every year I think of that evil coward hiding with his wives and porn in Abbottabad getting shot in the eye by good Americans.
I later got to shake the hand of one of those fine gentlemen on Veterans Day.
That eye dead made the world better. A lot more need to be shot of out evil heads - Khalid Sheikh Mohammed springs to mind - but it was a start.
If you’re the douchebag who came home to broken glass that day and have always wondered who threw that chunk of rubble through your asinine and deeply offensive sign and the glass behind it, now you know.
I still say a hearty fuck you. If you’d like to respond in any way, look me up and we’ll make it happen.
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