What Could Have Been

And I want to take today's episode to have my own remembrance, which I'm sure we'll conjure memories of your own, and to think about how much our world was transformed over the last twenty years, all of the things that have happened that prior to September eleventh, two thousand and one, we would have never thought could happen in this country. We believed prior to nine to eleven that our borders right at our oceans separated us from quote unquote the

bad people. That it wasn't you know for decades, Pearl Harbor being one of the only major attacks that we had ever seen in America throughout my entire lifetime, war or acts of war and acts of terror and violence were something that happened someplace else. They didn't happen in the United States. And even though we had our Timothy mcvays and would have our bombs in nineteen ninety six in Atlanta at the Olympics, those were kind of few

and far between. To think about this nine to eleven, twenty eighth year anniversary, on the backdrop of just having withdrawal from Afghanistan, to think about the thirteen troops military personnel that were killed at Kabul at the airport, the oldest being twenty three. They were toddlers, and some of them weren't even born when nine to eleven happened, and yet they were sent to defend a war that we've

been fighting for twenty years. I think about what life was like before, and twenty years is a long time to kind of remember when we felt safer, when we weren't surveiled, where we watched shows and movies that featured terrorists, but it wasn't anything that we ever experienced in our

own day to day lives. So I want to bring you back to where I was on September eleventh, two thousand and one, and things that I remember bubbling through my mind and kind of excitement that I had for the future, and then all of that excitement turning into fear. So September eleventh, two thousand and one, a couple of months prior, I had just graduated from college and was so excited. My whole life was in front of me.

What would I do? Where would I go? Well, first off, I was going to be setting off on a flight to Europe for the next three months to travel around the world. That was my gift that my parents had given me for graduation to do so with my best friend, and our flight was to take off on September thirteenth.

That morning, I was in Washington, DC. And just so folks have context, because I made a joke about this earlier that I was at my boyfriend's house, So that just goes to show you how much has changed in twenty years. And in Arlington, Virginia, I started to receive phone calls on what was probably a flip phone at that time. It was early in the morning, and I was no longer in college, and I was getting ready to leave in but a couple of days to travel

for the next three months. So I was sleeping and the phone kept ringing, kept ringing, and so finally I answered it, and on the other line was my boyfriend at the time, and he said, Danielle, where are you? And I was like, I'm in the apartment in Arlington. And it was like, do you know anybody that works in the world Trade Towers? And I thought to myself, what an odd question to be asking. No, I don't think so, but both of my parents are working in

the city. Why what's happening? Turn on the TV? Was the response. So I sit up and I turn on the television and on every station is smoke billowing out of the first tower that was hit. I could not, like the rest of the world, believe my eyes. This is one of the most, if not the most iconic skylines in the world, and all I could think of in that moment, because this day, like many traumatic days that would soon follow, are kind of I don't know,

etched into my mind. I looked into the towers and I'm thinking to myself, are people there are people inside? What's happening? And then right in front of us, the second plane hit. And then my reaction was, oh, my god, are there people on that plane? Because the initial thought when we first saw the smoke was that there had been an accident, right, because planes and helicopters fly around

New York City all the time. There are two of major international airports, right, and so it had to have been an accident, because it never would have occurred to any of us prior to that time that this was intentional, that it would be that nineteen hijackers fit with armor and zip ties would have the ability to hijack an entire fucking plane and crash it into the towers. Well, my eyes didn't leave the television screen except when there was news that there was another plane that had hit.

But this time it wasn't in New York that it was around the corner from where I was at the Pentagon, from the apartment building that I was living in at the time. On the balcony, you could see the smoke billowing up from the Pentagon, which was probably about a mile two miles away from where I was standing. It was if in that moment, the entire place, all of Arlington, all of New York, just seemed to stop dead in

its tracks. I turned back, went back inside, and feverishly began to call my parents, who, like I said, both were working in the city in Manhattan, at that time, and if folks remember, if you were trying to reach people in New York, all you got were busy signals. There was call waiting, was not breaking through, so you just kept having to call and call and call. So for an hour or so, which felt like forever at that time, I couldn't get in contact with either of

my parents. Finally I did, and I had called around to my grandparents, to my aunts, to my uncles to see if they had heard anything from them. Thankfully, my parents were okay. Thankfully my mother had gotten news while she was commune to the city about what had just transpired and was able to get on a train and head right back home. The same went for my dad. The fear that was coming from their voices and from my own was palpable. As we were on the phone,

asking each other what was happening. And remember I just had graduated from college. I'm thinking that the world is my oyster, that I'm getting ready to step out into this brave new space with all of this information and knowledge, ready to embark on my great adventure. It's now, in hindsight that I realized that my entire life has been from that moment on the kind of pathway into adulthood

has just been littered with traumatic United States event. It would be soon that school shootings would become the norm. It would become normal that our government, through the Patriot Act and passed almost unanimously, would be the beginning of surveillance on United States citizens, all with the idea that if we gave away our liberties right then our government

would keep us safe. We would never think that twenty years later you would be using the same tools that were to combat terrorism that put in the wrong hands like that of Donald Trump, would be used to surveil those that are fighting for justice or politicians that he just didn't like. Surveillance, it seems, has become our way of life, and we didn't realize that nine to eleven was the gateway drug to that right two hour or

Willian present the days following nine to eleven. I can remember first that once I was reunited that later that late afternoon on nine to eleven with my boyfriend at the time, who ended up having to walk from his job in DC all the way back to Arlington because traffic was that bad. People had abandoned their cars. There was just the panic in the air was palpable. When he finally reached back to where we were living at the time, we decided to go out and see what

was going on in the streets. Right empty, completely and totally empty. It was equivalent to what we saw during the shutdown in New York City, where you were seeing these iconic pictures of Times Square, in Central Park and Washington Square Park in all of these places, just completely empty. That's exactly what it looked like in Arlington, Virginia. Not a person, not a soul, was on the street. Everyone was in their house, glued to their television wondering what

was going to happen next. Was this the beginning of a larger attack? Now, remember there were multiple planes that were going around, and one of them was headed squarely towards the White House, but somehow was either shot down or missed, or what have you. We would later hear phone calls, last calls of those that were on the planes that hit the towers to their loved ones, saying goodbye. For families would forever be changed. Over three thousand Americans

died that day. While it was a time where I would say that I remember the country really coming together and George W. Bush was president and telling us that we were going to get through this together as Americans. I think about that in hindsight and in comparison to going to war with a virus, and how Donald Trump could have presented the American people with the same thoughts of unity, with the same thoughts of we will get through this traumatic, terrible time, but we will do so together.

But of course we know that he squandered that opportunity. But when George W. Bush said those things, there was something that passed my mind, and it was I wonder whatnicity the people are that attacked our country. And that is always a thing that has always been thought in my head. Anytime that somebody had ever said anything about a shooting or a robbing or whatever, my fear is always said, it's going to be a person of color, which means that then an entire community is going to

be victimized. Well, that is exactly what happened post nine to eleven, that once the ethnicities of the terrorists were revealed to be of Middle Eastern descent, to be of the Muslim faith. Mind you, there are over a billion Muslims in the world right over a billion people worship Islam. And yet we in this country decided that every single one of those millions of people were in fact terrorists.

Muslim Americans were surveiled, they were followed, they were threatened, they were beat up, and worse, now, all of a sudden, we began to fear our neighbors in a way that we never had before, all because of what these nineteen hijackers did. That is it for Today's Woke, a f daily podcast. To hear more from me, including five full hour long shows every single week, exclusive guests, interviews, and more. Support me on Patreon at Patreon dot com. Slash Woke

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