Anyone who was an adult 25 years ago can remember where they were when they heard news that Muslim terrorists had flown two passenger planes into the World Trade Center.It was one of those cataclysmic events that marks one’s mind indelibly and creates a permanent refraction, from before to after, like B.C. and A.D., or before COVID and after COVID. There was the world before 9/11 and the world after it.I was driving to work in Toronto that morning, listening to a news show hosted by a Vietnam War draft dodger who had fled America when his country needed him and had, in the decades since, achieved a degree of media stardom in Canada. If I recall correctly, he speculated, reasonably enough in those earliest seconds of the all-consuming news cycle, that a small plane carrying tourists to see the skyscrapers close up had met with disaster. If only that had been the case.
Shortly after I reached the office, the second plane hit. Reporters and editors who had been watching on TV as the first tower belched smoke into the blue sky, gasped in shock and horror when the second plane flashed across the screen and exploded in a ball of flame before a live worldwide audience.(Illustration by Alex Lakeview; Original image, King of Hearts)
