Latest / Letter to America / Never Forget

Transcript

Never Forget · Letter to America

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Twenty-five years ago today, we lived in Porchester, New York, just outside the city.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: My wife was dropping the boys off for their first day of preschool at the YWCA in Greenwich, Connecticut.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: I was at my desk when the first plane hit, and was standing with a few dozen people in the gym, staring at TV broadcasting CNN when the second plane hit.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: I knew what this meant and went straight to the Y to pick up my family and take them home.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: I felt the instinct to protect them in my body.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: Once we were together, I felt the need to see for myself with my own two eyes.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: We stopped at a yacht club on the way home to see what we could across Long Island Sound towards the skyline of Manhattan.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: As I recall, the towers were still standing at that point and billowing black smoke into a clear blue sky.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: Back home, we had a four-year-old and a two-year-old to distract, and a TV glued to CNN.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: The rest of that day is a blur of eerie silence interrupted by thunderous fighter jets overhead.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: Reflecting on it, I think the events triggered an identity crisis.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: The Middle East, my home for a large part of my life, suddenly seen through a starkly different lens.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: Us and them, confused beyond recognition.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: My nervous system fighting to frame the situation.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: What have they done to us?
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: What have we done to them?
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: What have we done to me?
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: My pronouns, my sense of self were challenged in one horrifying day.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: The infamous with us or against us framing didn't fit how I experienced the next decade.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: It was like a battle between two parts of me, the part that got hit and the part that hit back.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: The blows felt directed at me in both directions.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: A decade later, on September 12th, 2011, I posted my feelings on the 10th anniversary on Facebook.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: I largely disengaged from Facebook soon after, and have rarely been back.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: Today's 25th anniversary got me scrolling through, looking for the post.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: I only recalled the headline.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: Reading it again gave me a confusing sensation of something like nostalgia for one of the worst moments in history.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: I picked 912 because my mind had found, or perhaps created, a way to put the pieces together and frame them as something shared, the way it felt for me.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: I cringe in parts reading it today, the pain, the fear, the anger forged into absolute certainty.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: What follows are excerpts, lightly trimmed, from what I posted under the headline Why I'll Never Forget September 12, 2001.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: Having grown up in three countries and feeling more like a world citizen than one of any one of those, I'll never forget 912-01.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: I've always sought similarities rather than differences between people.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: I've been troubled, even threatened by forces that others find comfort in.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: Patriotism, religious faith, class, even funny things like college or sports team allegiance.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: These divisive forces could excite the animal parts of our brain, and when unleashed, lead to murdering 2,977 civilians as a symbolic gesture, or justifying vengeance on civilians in the name of protecting other civilians.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: On September 12, 2001, borders, boundaries, differences between us disappeared.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: Empathy, fear, love, unity, admiration for first responders and people who build rather than destroy.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: We held our families close.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: We made eye contact with strangers on the street.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: We called our friends and families around the world to hear a voice and confirm that we'd survived.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: It was personal, it could have been me.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: On September 11th, ten years ago, the forces that seek to divide and destroy took a big shot at what it means to be human, yet by the morning of September 12th, the power of our collective humanity had already defeated them.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: Read the newspapers from around the world from that day.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: Watch the scenes of spontaneous solidarity in cities far and wide.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: Feel what you felt that day.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: Remember and nurture that feeling of unity and humanity as world citizens.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: That feeling is our only hope as a species, and the only place I truly feel at home.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: Reading those words 15 years later, it's strange to both feel what I felt when I wrote that, like a phantom limb, and not feel like I agree with the basic premise.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: I missed a key point back then.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: The shock and horror of witnessing human suffering do expand our sense of community and unite people in their grief and shared humanity.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: And yet, simultaneously, in a manner I could not allow myself to accept, the fear that comes with that horror shrinks our sense of belonging and acts like glue that holds us together, however we define it, and results in a rage against them, however we define it.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: I don't mention in my piece that things got way more complicated in the next decade.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: I don't mention that I was in favor of the war against terror, and wrap my mind around the invasions of Afghanistan and even Iraq as necessary to not allow anything like this to happen again.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: It took years, and it wasn't an argument that did it.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: It was a gradual realization that my position wasn't about regaining safety or even about justice.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: It was hard to admit, but at some point I had been caught up in a desire for vengeance that I couldn't see, but now I can't unsee.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: I don't mention in that piece that friends of mine were humiliatingly screened at airports for many years after.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: Those close friends, born and raised in the U.S., suddenly felt unsafe in their own country.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: I suddenly felt a visceral need to identify myself for the first time as a Turkish American, a Middle Easterner, to try to embody a counter-narrative.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: I wasn't hallucinating the feeling that we was now a global citizenry held together by horror at what had happened.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: On September 13th, the French paper Le Monde did have a headline that said, Nous sommes tous Américains, we are all Americans.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: Humanity can make us feel like we're part of something very big.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's also true that by March 11, 2003, members of Congress directed the three house cafeterias to change all references to French fries and French toast on menus and replace them with Freedom Fries and Freedom Toast.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: Fear of them, on the other hand, can make us feel and act cornered and very small.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: On February 6, 2023, I felt echoes of these thoughts and feelings under circumstances that couldn't have been more different, and yet the same.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: A magnitude 7.8 earthquake hit southeastern Turkey.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: The disaster zone covered large swathes of Turkey and Syria.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: Around 60,000 lives are estimated to have been lost.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: A photographer friend of mine happened to be in Istanbul visiting and felt it was a sign that he should go and try to capture that scale of disaster to help with fundraising efforts for charities across the U.S.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: He asked me to join him as a translator.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: Next thing we knew, we were in Adana three days later.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: As we drove from Adana to Iskenderun, the scale of the destruction became more and more apparent.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: In Adana, most streets, most buildings, were whole and strangely normal.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: Isolated structures and areas were randomly devastated.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: As we moved south and walked the streets of Iskenderun, the scenes were reversed, total destruction, with occasional random buildings standing, mundane and incomprehensible at once.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: The scenes are difficult to describe.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: Household objects scattered in ways that make no sense.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: A wall clock in a doctor's office visible where the exterior wall had collapsed, exposing the otherwise intact interior.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: High heels, a coloring book, a man on his balcony in a suit, watering plants in a building standing next to piles of rubble.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: I find it hard to really go there mentally or emotionally.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: That said, a year later, I wrote some reflections to help me process.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: In part, February of 2024, I wrote, A year ago, I witnessed firsthand the unimaginable scale of destruction from the earthquake that struck southeastern Turkey.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: The lasting feelings I took away from the worst disaster I had ever seen was actually hope, humanity, and love.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: Every survivor, every aid worker, every person I came across in the days I spent in Adana and Iskandiron was kind, helpful, gentle, and deeply caring for each other and even me.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen, pure humanity.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: Today, on the 25th anniversary of 9-11, I think I may have a clearer picture than I did at either of these junctures.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: Seeing suffering makes us ask who needs our help?
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: Fear asks, who did this to us?
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: What separates these specific events is that one has a human target for that rage, them.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: The other is simply a natural disaster.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: Landslides, tsunamis, hurricanes, and earthquakes.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: The earth has no motive.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: There's no enemy, which means there's nothing for the fear to aim at.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: So the circle stays open.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: One image is seared on my retinas.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: Across the street from a collapsed building, a group of survivors and relatives from that building sat around a makeshift fire, waiting for relief workers to come and help them find their loved ones under that massive mountain of rubble.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: They had limited access to anything beyond the food and water already being distributed far and wide.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: A woman approached the group with a massive bottle of moisturizer and offered it to the ladies sitting around the fire with dry, chapped, dirty hands.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: Every single one of them looked up in shock and delight, smiled, and took a dollop of dignity.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: In New York, 25 years ago, suffering briefly expanded who counted as us.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: On the demolished streets of Iskendurun, I saw that the same expansion can happen even without anyone to hate.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: This is Handalin from Istanbul on September 11th, 2026.