I was at work at my software company when the planes hit, reading a proto-blog at the financial site TheStreet.com. One of the participants in the blog was in the twin towers when the first plane crashed into the first tower, and the blog participants - hedge fund managers, traders, etc - were first-hand witnesses. The confusion and fear was palpable, but it only became clear this was an attack and not an accident when I heard on the news that a plane had also hit the Pentagon. There were rumors of an attack on the President, and I remember thinking at the time 'man Saddam Hussein is going down.' The feeling I got was similar to that in watching the impeachment of Clinton - wow, this stuff really does happen.
Pretty soon, the country went crazy. While Bush was on a bullhorn standing on rubble, the neocons were gearing up for a war with Iraq and the administration was pushing for tax cuts for the wealthy, and the pundits let their fantasies of endless war and torture run wild. Karl Rove's lost and recovered 2002 powerpoint presentation basing the elections on war caused the total cave-in of all national security decision-making to neoconservative priorities, from which we haven't recovered. The discussion of what happened ignored our own history in the Middle East, as if these terrorists were some existential all-consuming force of evil who suddenly appeared for no reason and decided to hate and bomb America instead of an organized group of petty thugs using our own missteps against us.
"On Sept. 21, 2001, rescuers dug through the smoldering remains of the World Trade Center. Across town, families buried two firefighters found a week earlier. At Fort Drum, on the edge of New York's Adirondacks, soldiers readied for deployment halfway across the world.
Boards of directors of scores of American companies were also busy that day. They handed out millions of bargain-priced stock options to their top executives.
The terrorist attack shut the U.S. stock market for days. When it reopened Sept. 17, stocks skidded more than 14% over five days, in the worst full week for the Dow Jones Industrial Average since Germany invaded France in May 1940. But for recipients of options, the lower their company's stock price when options are awarded the better, since the options grant a right to buy shares at that price for years to come. The grants set recipients up for millions of dollars in profit if the shares recovered.
A Wall Street Journal analysis shows how some companies rushed, amid the post-9/11 stock-market decline, to give executives especially valuable options. A review of Standard & Poor's ExecuComp data for 1,800 leading companies indicates that from Sept. 17, 2001, through the end of the month, 511 top executives at 186 of these companies got stock-option grants. The number who received grants was 2.6 times as many as in the same stretch of September in 2000, and more than twice as many as in the like period in any other year between 1999 and 2003.
Ninety-one companies that didn't regularly grant stock options in September did so in the first two weeks of trading after the terror attack. Their grants were concentrated around Sept. 21, when the market reached its post-attack low. They were worth about $325 million when granted, based on a standard method of valuing stock options."
This was the ultimate culmination of Gordon Gecko's vision for America - greed is good. But at the same time, there were stories of great heroism and sacrifice, and the country's public - as opposed to the political leaders - was awakened to the understanding that there is something more fundamental to America than a pursuit for the most toys at all costs. One of my student escorts at West Point told me he was a freshman in high school at the time, and he decided he needed to do something about the attacks on our country, which is why he enlisted in the military. Firemen and police and volunteers sacrificed themselves to look for survivors, and cities like Boston readied hospitals to handle the overflow of casualties until it became clear there wouldn't be that many injured. The political blogosphere really started after 9/11, and though it was conservative at the time, it really was an important use of social media to discuss a national emergency, away from gatekeepers. Cell phone service was down, so people learned about their family and friends over email, the first time citizens could really directly organize their own communities across borders and time zones in an emergency without a third party entity in the way.
A national conversation really began, one that was pulled by our leadership - George Bush and John McCain among them - into the most petty and venal aspects of our nature, to one of revenge against all people who came from that region and a high fear environment in which we all meekly submit to government inspection of our communications and travel. One million of us are now on a terrorist watch list because of this conversation. And yet it was a real conversation, one which allowed new voices to eventually come in and disrupt the flow of petty thug-speak, to make the case that right makes might and not the other way around. These voices are still immature, incoherent, and disorganized, but they - we - had not spoken for decades, and we had not learned about political power and the meaning of citizenship.
The greatness of America is that we can fight over this day, over the sacrifice and the shame. The challenge of America is that it will take a real accounting of what our leaders have done in our names. It's not the exploitation of fear that is wrong; fear is a powerful motivator and in some ways it is always the motivation behind how humans behave. It's not the politicization of national security that was wrong, politics never stopped at the water's edge, that was a fantasy held by irresponsible Democratic politicians. It is the sheer theft and murder made explicitly tolerable by George Bush and his Republican mafia, and the enablers in the press and in some parts of the Democratic party. And when you juxtapose that with the greatness of those public servants - teachers, doctors, soldiers, diplomats, police - and their sacrifice for our rights as Americans and as humans, it becomes clear that the meaning of 9/11 is that politics and citizenship matters. And those that sacrifice and serve and speak out recognize that America's greatness comes from this willingness to take responsibility for the good and the bad in our country, to avoid the easy answers that have led us to constrain our own liberties and go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.
This is the conversation we are and should be having, and it is why America can restore herself to greatness as an idea inspiring a global community around shared aspirations.
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