I saw someone comparing current events to 9/11 and its aftermath and that made me remember that on the morning of september 11th, 2001, I was in a meeting somewhere in downtown Chicago, I forget where or what about.
I was a VISTA volunteer working at a nonprofit, it was related to that. Someone came in to the meeting and said a plane had hit a building in New York and it might be terrorism, and maybe our meeting would be canceled. I remember thinking that was silly. A few minutes later, everyone in the building was asked to leave, and we could see people in nearby buildings doing the same. I made my way back to my work’s office in the south loop, still feeling like this was all an overreaction. The Coalition for the Homeless was below us and their office had a TV. My coworkers and I went down there and watched the news and it began to dawn on me what had happened. I don’t remember much in any detail from the rest of the day except calling a friend in New York to make sure he was okay - he was, physically, though very shaken, “I was just there the other day and now they’re gone, those buildings are gone” - and trying to get hold of friends from Scotland who were coming to visit us and had flown in to New York on the 10th, planning to next come to Chicago. We did somehow reach someone who was in touch with them, I don’t recall who or how. The other thing I remember from that day is my girlfriend and our roommate and I watched TV that night trying to think about something else and a Simpsons episode came on where someone fires rockets at the Mad Magazine building - the rockets flew right past the twin towers - and blows up the building. My roommate speculated that someone got fired. I remember being sad and scared for people in New York and very frightened about the US government response. I also remember the days afterward feeling like I and everyone I knew on the left or who was vaguely leftish were all holding our breath waiting for what was coming. I remember at the time being very angry that speakers at demonstrations were fatalistic about war coming, I thought we could stop that. I now think I was naive. I think we have the power to sometimes delay the war machine and in the long run to dismantle it, but the war machine also has a lot of power and is hard to delay or to dismantle, and in that period the war was coming and the movement lacked the power to stop it. I spent a lot of time over the next two years or so at anti-war demonstrations. I attended fewer after the big demonstrations in 2003 didn’t seem to make a dent in the war machine, and I started doing labor movement/labor left stuff for a while instead on the thought that it could make a difference in the world in the short term and maybe in the long term help create a situation where we could stop the war machine. I remember the last thing I went to was a march with a mock up of a coffin and a drummer playing a slow beat and a chant with a refrain of “we can not live with this,” and it was slow and frankly a little dull musically, and it seemed like the demonstration was partly mourning the movement’s own decline and incapacity to stop the war, and that did feel unlivable, so I decided I need to put my energy and time somewhere else. Hence the labor stuff.