It has been exactly ten years since the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. From 1997 to 2006, I worked as a research assistant for the Los Angeles bureau of a major Japanese news organization, which involved constant monitoring of what was going on locally and in the region, as well as going out into the field to gather information and conducting interviews in person and on the phone.
Ten years ago, I was in the habit of falling asleep with the radio on to either the AM all-news station or the local NPR stations. On the morning of September 11, 2001, while still half-conscious, I remember hearing on the news program that a plane had hit at least one of the towers of the World Trade Center, but it sounded like it had been a small passenger plane, not a massive commercial jetliner.
As events became more alarming, the news reported that first one tower had collapsed. When it finally sank in to my mind that something catastrophic had happened, I got out of bed and called my boss, the Japanese correspondent who was assigned to the Los Angeles bureau, who had not yet heard what happened. I believe we were both watching the news at home for the next hour or two, and then agreed to meet at the office in downtown Los Angeles.
I don't remember at what point the federal government ordered all flights in U.S. airspace to land, but as I drove from Glendale into downtown, I remember looking up at the sky, fearful that a jet plane would be flown into one of the many skyscrapers, particularly the First Interstate Library Tower, the tallest building in the United States west of the Mississippi River.
That day, as I worked next to the television, I kept seeing the same images of the attacks: a middle-aged African-American woman in a business suit covered in dust and staggering in the street, people falling to their deaths from the upper floors of the World Trade Center, people running from the approaching dust cloud coming at them like an avalanche in the streets of Manhattan.
Because our organization had larger bureaus in New York City and Washington, our job in Los Angeles mainly focused on what was happening on the West Coast: the grounding of the U.S. passenger fleet, the closures of the Hollywood studios and California theme parks. Within a few days, our coverage started focusing on the hate crimes being committed on Muslim and Arab Americans in the United States, including a convenience store owner killed in San Gabriel, and attacks on mosques in northeast Los Angeles.
The horrific events of that day and the U.S.response to them fundamentally changed the course of the nation. The terrorist attacks were a blow to Americans' sense of security, similar to the attack on Pearl Harbor sixty years previous. The Bush Administration took advantage of the sense that the nation was under attack two years later to undertake an invasion of Iraq and overthrow of Sadam Hussein, and the escalating war in the Middle East reversed several years of reduction of the federal deficit under Bill Clinton, and will complicate the United States budget for decades to come. The war on Al Quaida and the Taliban also undermined efforts on such issues as immigration reform by making everything else secondary to national security.
