I remember exactly where I was when I learned the first plane hit the Twin Towers.
I was riding in a Durango headed south on Broad Street toward my office in Philadelphia. My mind envisioned a horrible, tragic accident.
I remember exactly where I was when I learned the second plane hit the Twin Towers. I had reached my office and was sitting at my keyboard, the same one I am using to type this column.
That was when I realized it wasn’t an accident at all. The few moments between those events represent the last, bittersweet stretch of time in my life when I believed that we are victims of random cruelty.
Learning of the second crash, and what precipitated it, forced me to confront the fact that there is something even worse than randomness.
Sept. 11, 2001 at exactly 9:03 a.m. and 1 second, I realized there was evil in the world.
It’s not that I wasn’t aware of the vicious nature of Islamic fundamentalism. I handled asylum cases where the Taliban made life hell for my clients.
I knew what it was like to escape the Iranian mullahs because you were considered a religious apostate. It wasn’t news to me that women who didn’t wear veils to erase their identities were slated for death. But the full measure of Islamic terror was on display on 9/11, in the form of Saudis, people with whom our own government had allied in some diabolical alliance.
It was the story of the scorpion and the frog, and we were the frogs.
Some of the people reading this column weren’t born when 9/11 happened. Some were so young they have the same vague memories I have of the assassination of JFK.
I was sitting on my mother’s lap as she sobbed uncontrollably, but I only know that because my mother told me in later years she held on to her baby girl so tightly that I squirmed and cried in discomfort.
That’s the way many in Gen Z and the millennials view the terror attacks. And even they have the decency to mourn people they never met, who were murdered on a bright and sunny September Tuesday simply because they had the misfortune of being in the city that symbolized America for those who hated us.
They were normal people — men and women; boys, girls and babies; elderly folk; and mostly young adults — with their lives stretching before them in shining promise.
All of them, gone. And the generations that weren’t here have the decency to grieve.
But not all of them. Some in my own generation hate this country and its people, its traditions, its status in the world and its significance across the arc of history, to such an extent that they are capable of saying “America deserved 9/11″.