The morning of 9/11, I was an assistant city editor at a small newspaper in West Texas. It was the first place I’d ever worked in journalism, as I’d started as an education reporter almost a year prior. I went into the office early, as always, not knowing that by doing so, I would witness history.
So many thoughts went through my head in the moments before I watched the Twin Towers fall. True to being an engineer’s daughter—they were all about logistics. How would the first responders get to the people trapped above where the planes hit? How on earth would the firefighters be able to put out a fire caused by jet fuel near the top of a high-rise? What if the buildings fell?
All I could think was everyone needed to get out of there—fast. But that’s all I could do—think. I was thousands of miles away, an observer of a horrible day, of what would be the beginning of the complete unraveling of this country’s sanity.
Sept. 11th is an origin story.
I still cry when I think about that day. Of the heroism and the terror. Of the two devastating wars that followed. Of the blow to our civil liberties that are still under assault today. How the presidency became more powerful, so powerful that now the current occupant of the White House is treated more like an emperor than a democratically elected leader. September 11, 2001 changed everything.
Other than the eight years of the Obama Administration, which were marked by partisan inertia mixed with hopeful progress, I feel like we’ve known no peace since 2001.
The summer before 9/11, the biggest news story was the disappearance of intern Chandra Levy. I always say the summer of 2001 was the last “real” summer when the news was slow. After 9/11, CNN introduced the ticker at the bottom of the screen, and then it never went away. The news cycle became even more intense and compressed, and never stopped ramping up until we had the mess we have today. Now we are constantly assaulted with bad news about everything from the wars in the Middle East to the latest food recall.
Before the lockdown of 2020 (and close runner-ups, the last three years), 2001 was the worst year of my life. I was severely depressed in a suffocating marriage to a controlling, neglectful troglodyte. I was making only $22,000 a year working in a dusty oil town during a bust cycle, and we’d gone more than $10,000 in debt. I’d recently moved to a larger apartment to accommodate my then-husband, who refused to get a job or go back to school. I could barely make the $400 a month in rent. We broke up over the summer, but he stayed with me for months until he finally moved out that October, one day after my birthday, leaving me with the “surprise” of a negative bank balance. I was sick at the time, so I pawned my TV and wedding ring to buy medicine.
My ex would continue to try to dictate my life from his mother’s house in East St. Louis until I filed for divorce that November, shortly after he threatened to stalk me. Around this same time, my grandfather died, which he wasn’t sensitive to at all, demanding that I send him money on the same day I found out my family had buried him and didn’t tell me. They said they wanted to protect me during a difficult time, as I was up for a job in California that they wanted me to take, but I was upset for years that I never got to properly say goodbye.
I was only 24. And I should have felt like I had an amazing life ahead of me, but instead I was struggling with suicidal ideation. I lost more than 20 lbs in a month. And at the same time I was dealing with this, the country was still reeling from the attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C.
The footage was played over and over for weeks, until all the news stations agreed to show the images from that day only sparingly going forward. And first responders were working on the pile for months, digging out remains and being exposed to dangerous chemicals that caused various diseases and cancers that would go on to kill many of them.
I think what’s hardest for me to reconcile is this was entirely preventable. If our then-President George W. Bush had simply heeded the previous administration’s warnings that Osama bin Laden was determined to orchestrate a terrorist attack on the United States, perhaps it might have never happened. Nearly 3,000 people didn’t have to die. Sanity in America didn’t have to die. Those first responders and people who lived and worked in the toxic aftermath didn’t have to die. And now we have another, even more inept leader at the helm who disregards experts and is surrounded by sycophants.
For 25 years, I’ve been mourning 9/11 and what happened in its wake. It’s hard for me to process why, in their quest for power, the Bush-Cheney Administration never considered that they would leave us vulnerable to a madman at the wheel. They simply never thought that, in their pursuit of an ever-more policed and politically manipulated populace, they would create the perfect environment for the end of our already weak Democracy.
While my life would eventually turn around by 2009, eight years after Sept. 11th, the country never recovered. Lives were forever lost. Soldiers came back injured and maimed. The country settled into a kind of political schizophrenia that it has never recovered from, with one side living in reality and the other in a Fox News hate-filled bubble.
Sept. 11th was truly the beginning of the end of everything. How it will all ultimately unfold is still to be seen, but as a trend-spotting soothsayer, the immediate future doesn’t look good.
And now for THE WEEK IN SNOB…
LABOR DAY — THE CACOPHONY: Is it 4 percent unemployment or 24 percent? Is it personal responsibility, or are the billionaires hoarding all the money? Is it Oochie Wally or One Mic? These are the questions The Snob pondered this past Labor Day, when the socialist themes in Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle were more relevant than ever. The Gilded Age is back and tackier than ever, as the Robber Barons never left. They just became tech bros. (The Creation of Labor Day Was A Triumph, But Today’s Jobless Rate Is A Tragedy)
LOVE, DEATH, AND KILLER AI ROBOTS: “It’s getting weird,” I thought in my Nene Leakes voice. While I was binging Real Housewives and celebrating the return of The Real Housewives of Potomac, a rogue researcher at Anthropic sounded the alarm on how the AI arms race could end humanity in about 10 years. All I can think is: why must we make Skynet? Can we check in with whoever is the equivalent of Miles Dyson in this timeline and persuade him NOT to doom us all? If the Terminator films have taught me nothing, fate is what we make, so why are we choosing this particular inevitability that doesn’t have to be inevitable? Sure wish we had some kind of functioning, non-gifting government that could do something about this! But until then, I’ll be watching Bravo. (AI Could Kill All Humans … Hmmm, I Wonder What’s On Real Housewives Right Now?)
THE BLACK SNOB POD DEBUTS SEPTEMBER 24TH: Get ready! Subscribe to THE BLACK SNOB POD on YouTube NOW so you can get the first episode of The Snob Pod when it drops this month on Thursday, Sept. 24th! The first episode features my chat with my friend, Christina Blacken of The New Quo Foundation and her storytelling platform, Change My Mind. During our interview, Blacken talks about how she built her own kind of post-graduate program by educating herself through the different jobs she took in the legal and media fields, leading her to build a business that helps Fortune 500 companies become more equitable and empathetic in how they treat their employees. (The Black Snob Podcast)
STORY TIME WITH THE SNOB: If you’re a paid subscriber, you’re in for a treat! A nosey treat. This past summer, I wrote a viral Thread about the time I blew up my relationship that I didn’t know I had with Roc Nation. This was because The Root criticized Jay Z and Roger Goodell’s alliance back when I was still editor-in-chief. I told folks I’d come back with more stories from my career about what goes on behind the scenes in newsmaking, and so I’m starting a new series on THE BLACK SNOB called STORY TIME. Story Time will launch in October and will be for paid subscribers only. I will also do Q&As and video content as part of it. So become a paid subscriber today so you won’t miss out when Story Time launches next month! (Subscribe to The Black Snob blog!)