Facebook says I should never forget; let me tell you why I choose not to forget

Three thousand people were killed in our backyard, and everyone says it's a good thing to move on, but you know what, I don't want to move on. I want that hurt and that pain to stay with me, because if I ever forget even a small piece, then I start feeling guilty.  Hell, I am stuck in the middle of Oklahoma right now, and I feel guilty that I am unable to be home in my city to grieve in my concrete jungle.

People throw up a Facebook status, then go back to watching their college football or mall shopping or whatever the fuck it is that they are doing. They have no understanding of what happened to our city that morning, and will never understand the magnitude of the tangible assault on the senses (I say that literally: the sights, the smells, the sounds).

If you weren't there, people, then don't patronize me with some empty patriotic saying in between your Saturday errands. Come sit down with me, buy me a beer and listen to what I have to say, and learn about what it was like to be a New Yorker on that day. But don't ever think that a couple keystrokes on your smartphone will ever be enough to give back what so many people lost that day. If you don't understand, then just accept that you are not part of our fraternity, and stop pretending.  

Here is the reality, as much as it hurts, you have to accept it: if you were in a position of safety where your life was not physically threatened, then you haven't earned the right to have your voice heard over those that died or those that lost something.  If you didn't spend your entire life living and breathing in the greatest city, then you will never understand.  If you were sitting in some class in junior high or high school two thousand miles away, watching it on TV, you may take solace in the fact that you can participate in the shared national shock suffered by all across the nation, but you will never be one of us -- we who were there.  

Yes, you're right: it is a shallow, elitist and exclusive view, and I should be bigger than that.  I should be better than that.  

But you do not know what it was like to have a brigade-sized element murdered in your backyard.  I do.

You can say what you want, you can feel you want, and that's fine: my soldiers and I risk our lives so you can enjoy that right.  But I don't have to like what you have to say, and I don't have to listen or care.  Not on this day.  Be deferential today and be sensitive, because it's not your day.  It's mine.  And it's the only day of the year that I deserve to be as small or shallow or insensitive to your feelings as I want.  Tomorrow, the status quo returns, and the emotional and physical and security needs of America will once again go before mine.  

But let me have today.

If I don't care about the "Ground Zero Mosque", why should you?

This was written a few days ago, before the crazy Florida guy backed off from his plan to publicly burn Qurans...


I'm gonna lay it out there: I really don't give a shit about who practices what religion in whatever location.

Here are my credentials: I'm from NYC; I was in NYC on the island of Manhattan on 11 SEP 2001; I'm in the military; I served in Iraq; we lost soldiers.

An Islamic Center downtown really doesn't bother me (assuming they are not being funded by al Qaeda, the boogeyman or the Devil).  So somebody explain to me why people who aren't from MY goddamn town who weren't there on THAT day and who think Sharia is representative of everything radical and crazy (newsflash: it's not; it's just overarching classical Islamic law -- there's even a book or two out there on this stuff: I read 'em, I recommend everyone else do so as well) are making such a big f*cking deal out of this "Ground Zero mosque" nonsense???

I'm serious, I actually need some convincing.  If it was all 9/11 families, that would be one thing: I can understand the difficulty in separating the traumatic emotional hearbreak of losing someone from other issues.  But I do NOT understand these random people from all over the country weighing in on this shit.

And now some church in Florida is going to burn Qurans on 9/11 because they think Islam is evil??  Seriously??  Do those idiots really think that the proper way to "remember the 9/11 victims" is to fucking burn Qurans???  Are they even aware that some of the victims were Muslim (and I'm not talking about the hijackers -- I'm talking about regular people)?  Shit, do you think they even plan on looking inside these Qurans before burning them?  Do you think they know what a Surah is?  Do you think they know that the Surahs are ordered not in chronological order, but by length (because it was originally an oral text passed down from generation to generation, and the ordering facilitated memorization).  Who are we joking: of course not.  Even without doing any research, I think I can safely assume that that church of idiots is completely ignorant of everything that is outside of their little bubble.

It's all right I guess, I'm sure there won't be any images or video of this retardation and I'm sure it won't make it onto the Internet and I'm sure it won't be manipulated for God-knows-what kind of purposes.

Does anyone else see the absurdity in all of this, or am I the only one?  If I am the crazy one, someone please set me straight.

That morning, the sky was blue: not a single cloud in sight

The sky was a perfect kind of blue without a single cloud in sight; it was still t-shirt and shorts weather. Nine years later and I can still remember what it smelled like, the way my skin was numb, the mass exodus to go north or just get the fuck off the island, and the strangeness of hearing total silence that night: no cars, no planes, not a goddamn thing except for a fighter jet that screamed overhead every now and then that freaked us the fuck out. 

Everybody was in shock. It was so offensive and so personal, like getting punched right in the mouth...nobody knew what to think or what to feel.  Am I supposed to be a an ignorant gung-ho idiot and say I hate all Muslims?  Am I supposed to preach peace, love and tolerance, so the terrorists don't win?  Somebody tell us what the fuck we're supposed to feel, because right now nobody fucking knows.

For days afterward, people walking around like zombies in the middle of 5th Avenue and Broadway because everything below 14th St was in the lockdown zone (no cars except emergency vehicles), making crazy shadows in the dust (which hung around for a solid 3 weeks) especially when the sun was low -- like out of a horror movie.

The Cortlandt Street stop

I remember the mall that was underneath the towers: Cortlandt Street stop on the 1-9.  Or the N-R stop a couple blocks away.  MetroCards were blue and tokens had that pentagon-shaped silver thing in the middle (after they replaced the ones with the hole in the middle and the ones with the big cutout Y of N-Y-C).  Hell, just walk it -- just a few blocks.  Go the back way through Battery Park: go into that other mall with all of the glass and metal, take the bridge across the West Side Highway; forget about trying to cross it at street level: you'll die.  

I used to go into the Sam Goody in the basement mall underneath the towers as a kid, trying to figure out which CD I was going to waste my money on to stick into my bright yellow Sony discman.  I remember the greasy and overpriced slices at the Sbarro.  I remember snickering at all the poor Jersey fucks who had to take the friggin' PATH train to come into my city.  I remember the bigass escalators in the lobbies, with all of the international flags on the second floor.  

Suits on Motorolas and Nextels, and tourists all over the place, waiting for the elevators.  Shoeshine guys buffing away on Italian leather wingtips that cost more than your parents made in a month.  Express elevators that skipped whole bunches of floors -- different ones for different sky lobbies.  I remember the home video my dad took of me on the roof when I was little, and how the audio on the VHS was all fucked up from the interference from the gigantic antenna and how absurdly small the city's huge buildings looked, with little yellow matchbox cars sliding up and down the pencil-thin streets with little tiny dots playing Frogger in between them.  

I remember eating lunch in the plaza at the base of the towers: sitting at the fountain thing with the big metal globe, surrounded by businessmen taking drags off of their cigarettes in between bites of a $1 hotdog and a Poland Spring or Snapple, their suit jackets folded neatly beside them, company badges and ID cards hanging from belt loops or shirt pockets or coat lapels.  Tourists, arched backwards aiming their cameras straight up, trying to get both towers in the frame, pointing towards infinity.  I remember exiting any subway station within sight of the WTC and automatically looking for the towers to orient myself: our compass.

What do you remember?