As the Knicks made it to the NBA finals this past June and New York was steeped in collective effervescence, that sense of energy and unity when a large group shares the same emotional connection at the same time, my students asked me if I had ever experienced that before.
They noticed that people were looking up from their phones. People were smiling, holding open a door for you. Bars and restaurants were crowded, and people were talking to strangers. If you were wearing a Knicks hat or a Knicks jersey, you got a smile or a thumbs-up. Knicks in five became a greeting.
I paused before answering.
As a born and raised New Yorker, I recognized this version of the city I love. New York is a big city, but in reality, it is a city of neighborhoods where people historically look out for each other and come together in tough times. In the last decade, between the pandemic, the obsession with mobile phones, and the political polarization, as in most places in our country, it’s felt disjointed. But in reality, it has been even longer than that since that feeling of unity filled the streets.
Twenty-five years to be exact.
I told them the truth. I said, yes, I had indeed experienced it before. The difference was that the last time was not for something as joyful as our beloved Knicks on the road to their first NBA title in fifty-three years. It was on 9/11, the day and the weeks and the months that followed.
The room grew quiet.
The majority of my students were either not born twenty-five years ago or too young to remember what happened that day, much less in the days after. It’s estimated that there are 100 million Americans who are alive today and have no lived memory of that fateful day.
I had no pictures on my phone to show them because in 2001, there were no mobile phones with cameras ready to capture any given moment and share it on social media.
But I do have pictures that live in my head as clearly as though it were yesterday.
A memory of waking up to a picture-perfect New York day, the bright blue sky absent of clouds, the sun hitting the buildings in that way that reminded you it was September and that summer was indeed over.
It was my first official day as Director of Sales for NY1, and I remember the television screen in my office, Pat Kiernan’s face in front of an image of the first plane hitting the North Tower. I remember saying to a colleague that what we just saw could not possibly be real.
But it was.
I can see myself very clearly walking to the corner of 19th and Sixth Avenue and seeing throngs of people walking uptown, some covered with soot, everyone with the same look of disbelief on their faces.
How could this possibly be real?
When I turned to look south towards where the view had been of the Twin Towers, all that filled the skyline were huge clouds of dark smoke and debris.
I remember my body almost numb with fear.
I walked uptown to my apartment on the Upper West Side alongside three of my colleagues, the city in lockdown, no trains or buses or cars allowed in or out, with the exception of emergency vehicles. And I remember the eerie quiet.
The quiet was the most frightening of all.
It was a foreign sound in a city that is known as the city that never sleeps.
I did not share those details with my students.
What I did try to explain was that aside from the horror, the fear, and the disbelief of what I witnessed that day, what has also stayed with me all these years later is what happened in the days and weeks after.
It was a feeling of unity, of being connected.
No one needed to explain how they felt. We were all feeling it.
In the midst of that horrible attack, the tragedy of all the lives lost, we also witnessed the best of humanity.
Strangers helping strangers.
Heroes who went into what came to be known as ‘the pile’ looking for lives to save, not knowing if they would come out alive.
Walking down the street, you might catch the eye of another person and exchange a knowing look. Whether or not you lost a loved one that day, everyone was affected; everyone lost something that day.
A loss of innocence.
A world that would never be the same again.
It was not just in New York and the sites of the Twin Towers.
It wasn’t just the Pentagon and the town of Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where Flight 93 crashed. It was the entire country, united in a way I had never experienced before and, unfortunately, have never experienced since.
Regardless of what you thought of President George W. Bush before or after – and trust me, I had not been a fan – at that moment, he rose to the occasion as a leader and helped to unite us. By showing us his humanity, he demonstrated that it was not about being a Republican, a Democrat, or an Independent; it was about being an American.
The Knicks’ win gave New York a taste of that unity.
This time it was for a much more positive reason. It’s something that has been missing. Something that social media, mobile phone addiction, and an administration that takes glee in looking for ways to divide us has eroded.
Unity. Kindness. Connection. A shared humanity.
This year marks the 25th Anniversary of the attacks. On the one hand, it feels like yesterday, and on the other, it feels like a lifetime ago.
For me, it has been and always will be a day of remembrance for the lives lost and what we as a society have lost. We can’t bring back those who died that day and in the years after as a result of the diseases that first responders and people who lived close to the Towers suffered from the toxins in the air they breathed in.
But we can create a version of that collective effervescence everyone experienced during the Knicks finals.
We can smile at a stranger.
We can commit a random act of kindness.
We can continue to vow to #NeverForget – not just in remembrance of the lives lost but in how we all came together afterwards.
Leave a Reply