I remember

9/11

It’s hard to believe that adults walking around today do not remember 9/11/01, but I suppose time has gone by. I remember it very well.

I was working for the Health Professionals and Allied Employees, a New Jersey nurses’ and other health care workers’ union. I was running an organizing campaign in Red Bank, New Jersey, and the majority of the nurses working at the hospital lived in Middletown, New Jersey. I heard later that Middletown was the town in New Jersey that lost the most people in the tragedy, though I’m not sure if that’s true. I know that all of the nurses involved in the campaign and almost everyone at the hospital was deeply personally affected.

We had just finished our first meeting of the morning, a 7:30 am Organizing Committee meeting. It was the day when we were putting out cards, which (for all of you who have never been involved in a National Labor Relations Board election) is when we give the workers union cards that the other workers can sign. Signing a union card does not make you part of the union if your workplace as a whole is not already represented by the union (this is for workplaces that are covered by the traditional NLRA procedure, not construction, not Uber drivers, etc.). It is a part of the process towards having an election where workers will vote on if they, as a group, want to have collective bargaining.

It is possible to file for an election with 30% on cards, but no one sensible does that. I never had a hard and fast rule about a percentage, but I knew a winner when I saw one. I never put out cards until I had built a committee of workers who were well-educated about the union and brave enough to be public in their support and talk to their co-workers. (I mean, except when I did, but St. Chris was such a hot shop it was an exception! )

The day you put out cards is a very big deal in a campaign, and we had a huge turnout at our first meeting. We were all excited. Elated, even. We finished up the meeting, went downstairs to head out to a diner for breakfast.

There was a group of nurses at the hotel bar (we had our meetings in hotel conference rooms most of the time.) Now it’s not unusual for night shift nurses to get a drink after work, so I asked them, “Grabbing a drink after work?”

No, they informed me, they were watching the TV. A plane had just hit one of the Twin Towers.

We went for breakfast. No one knew what was happening. Our cell phone calls only periodically got through. The girlfriend of one of my staff organizers didn’t know if her dad, who worked at the World Trade Center, was alive or dead. We found out later that he had delayed going into work that day to go and vote in either a primary or a local election, I can’t remember which. That saved his life. There were so many stories of lucky escapes. Too many stories of people who did not escape.

The campaign ended shortly thereafter. In spite of brave nurses’ attempts to get their coworkers to go on, people were just not able to focus on the massive psychological lift of organizing a union in the face of aggressive opposition from management at a time when the nation was in crisis and their own little town was in mourning.

I remember the wave of anti-anyone who appeared to be from the Middle East sentiment and violence that swept the country. My then boyfriend and I stopped by all the gas stations owned by Sikhs to offer our support if there was anything we could do. Anyone who might even vaguely be mistaken for a person of Arab ancestry was in danger.

9/11 rocked our country’s sense of security in a way that I don’t think anything had since we hid under our desks in strange and inappropriate drills for the dropping of a nuclear bomb. People had all levels of reactions to feeling unsafe, and some to a near brush with death.

Lots of people got married. Lots of people got divorced. I did neither, though I understood the impulse to do both.

9/11 was sudden and a surprise, and it focused our country’s attention, for good or for ill. I was never in support of the following war in Iraq and always thought the whole thing was ridiculous. But I did think it was important to take seriously that there were people who were willing to die to destroy what the US symbolized to them.

Today we are faced with a not sudden, but rapidly becoming dramatic crisis of climate change. It is way too hot, and we are getting used to climate-related disasters. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend you watch The Peripheral on Amazon. It is based on a William Gibson novel, written in 2014, in which he predicts with eerie accuracy almost everything we see happening right now. While both Left and Right fight a culture war, we are all about to roast together.

I am afraid. No one will fare well in a climate disaster future, but those who are not extremely rich will fare worse, and those who are very poor will fare the worst of all, including dying. There is violence and looting in my neighborhood in the wake of political upheaval. I am afraid to see what would happen if there were the kind of months-long blackouts of the electrical grid that are possible if a major storm knocks out all the transformers in a major city.

I am reminded of how Gendry described the White Walkers in Game of Thrones. “Bad, really bad.” That’s how climate change is. Bad. Really bad.

“If we don’t put aside our enmities, we will die,” said Sur Davos Seaworth.

“Right now, you, and I, and Circe, are children playing at a game and screaming that the rules aren’t fair.” That’s Jon Snow, talking about humans killing each other when Death itself was coming for the entire human race.

Death itself is coming for us, but it isn’t Winter, it’s the hottest summer imaginable.

I hope we can put aside our enmities. Summer is coming.

I want the flowers to keep blooming.