“Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” —. John 15:13
I don’t know how you explain 9/11 to people who weren’t there.
I woke up that morning to a friend telling me to turn on the TV. He had seen what was happening in Manhattan and told me to call him immediately.
I turned it on and watched the remnants of the first plane go into the first tower. Then, sitting there in absolute disbelief, I watched the second plane hit.
The phone started ringing.
Military friends calling from Texas. Friends who worked in the towers. People who were supposed to have gone to work that morning but didn’t.
One of my friends was a network engineer working on floors 67–87 in both towers. He didn’t go in that morning because he was at the airport waiting for his future in-laws to arrive from Italy. They were delayed. He was wondering why.
Then he found out.
I was born and raised in New York City.
And my immediate reaction wasn’t to run away. It was: How can I help?
I volunteered at the Javits Center doing tech support for the NYPD and FDNY. Then I became the project lead for the missing persons database at Channel 13, managing 40 Columbia students who were logging missing-person reports.
I’ll never forget the names people kept calling in.
I’ll never forget Josh Vitale from Cantor Fitzgerald and how many people called looking for him.
I didn’t sleep for 72 hours.
Eventually, I was given a Ground Zero pass because evidence from the terrorist crime scene needed to be transported. They asked if there was anything else I wanted.
I said, “I’d love to see where Sesame Street was filmed.”
And somehow, in the middle of all that darkness, I had this beautiful little moment of reconnecting with my childhood.
I remember Ground Zero.
I remember the smoke.
I remember the smell that stayed in the city and the boroughs for months.
I remember people running.
I remember people helping strangers.
I remember a friend who worked in Tower 7 racing all the way to 42nd Street and taking a bus across the bridge.
I remember people taking the Staten Island Ferry to get out of Manhattan.
I remember another dear friend running away from the buildings and ending up in one of those iconic photographs.
I remember dating a firefighter from Rescue 1 who didn’t come home.
I remember Father Mychal Judge.
I remember going to a black-tie dinner honoring the first responders and raising money for their families.
And I remember New York.
For a brief moment, nobody cared who you voted for.
Nobody cared whether you were rich or poor, Black, white, Latino, Christian, Jewish, Democrat or Republican.
We were New Yorkers.
We were Americans.
We came together.
My father served in wartime, and he told me he never thought he’d see the day his daughter would experience something that reminded him of what he had seen in war.
That stays with me.
So when I see people today trying to turn 9/11 into a political comparison, or minimize what happened by immediately comparing it to another conflict, I have to say this:
9/11 wasn’t a metaphor.
It was terrorism on American soil.
Nearly 3,000 innocent people were murdered.
Families lost fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters and friends.
First responders ran toward the buildings while everyone else was running away.
Survivors carried what happened with them for the rest of their lives.
You don’t have to agree with me politically to respect that.
And you don’t have to have lived through it to understand that some experiences deserve to be remembered on their own terms.
I am a Latina. I am a patriot. I am a New Yorker.
And I will never forget.
🇺🇸 Never forget.