The morning of September 11, 2001 was one of those crystal clear, cool, dry, early September days that let you know Autumn in coming. It was my second day of classes in medical school at Boston University. As a 41 year old first-month medical student, it represented a new beginning for me. After 20 years as a computer programmer, engineer, and mathematician, I was starting a new career in medicine, with a rough plan to become an oncologist. The front of the main medical school entrance faces southeast, on the flight path of the planes departing from Logan Airport. They roared past, high over Albany Street, left to right. I remember regarding the weather with the term pilots sometimes use, “Severe Clear.”
September 2001 was a time of both personal and general optimism. The Cold War was over. The markets were booming, near all-time highs. I was aware of what Francis Fukuyama had called, “the end of history,” to describe the ascendancy of liberal democracy across the globe, and the waning of the ideologies and conflicts that had described much of history through the Twentieth Century. Into this unprecedented time of optimism, prosperity, and peace, I was starting a new career in medicine. Liberty, civil rights, international cooperation, and free markets, were advancing across the globe. Poverty, war, and nationalism were in rapid retreat. The internet was connecting people everywhere with a promise of unlimited access to knowledge, connection, and mutual understanding.
Nowhere was this more evident than in medicine, which has always been a very international community, with an ethos that transcended national, cultural, and linguistic borders. My new friends in medical school were from everywhere, Libya, Lebanon, Romania, Afghanistan, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, India, Taiwan, and more. My chosen field of oncology seemed poised in particular for rapid advancement. A rough draft of the complete human genome had recently been announced, and could be accessed almost instantly by researchers globally.
I was in the cafe in the basement of the medical school when the television in the corner of the room showed a live broadcast of a smoking World Trade Center in New York, after a passenger jet from Boston had hit one of the towers. Had I just watched that jet roar by earlier in the morning? A crowd had gathered in the room. There was much discussion about how such a thing could happen. We were watching the live broadcast when the second passenger jet hit the South tower. My breakfast rose in my throat, realizing I had just watched hundreds of lives instantly and horribly snuffed out in a ball of fire. This was a terrorist attack. Everything had changed. It did not seem important to go to the next class, which was Psychiatry.
When the South Tower collapsed, about an hour later, the basement of the medical school suddenly felt suffocating. I went out into the courtyard, under that cool, blue sky. I sat on a bench, covered my face, and sobbed into my hands. At that moment, I saw the end of all that optimism. I saw our opening up to the world being coming to and end, and being replaced by a new war. I saw civil rights being curtailed, and a return of all the ugliness that Fukuyama’s “history” had to offer. I sat there for a long time under that deep blue sky, thinking about how the world had just changed, and thinking about thousands of lives so violently and malevolently taken.
I would later learn that my sister's husband, a Manhattan real estate broker, had an early morning meeting in the WTC rescheduled to later in the day at the last minute. This probably saved his life. My stepsister's husband was also called away at the last minute, after organizing a conference for dozens of his colleagues in finance at the Windows on the World restaurant on top of the North Tower. None of them survived.
Now, twenty years later, I am an oncologist at Boston Medical Center, and on the faculty of BU. The scientific optimism of 2001 has proven to be justified, and continues to be, with advances in oncology coming so fast that it is a struggle to keep up. It continues to be a privilege for me to work with colleagues from a huge diversity of backgrounds.
However, we are still digging ourselves out of the cultural rubble that has given us several wars, a surveillance state, a closing of international doors, poisonous political polarization, legislative and executive branches of government both run amok, an opioid epidemic, and civil liberties in retreat. Much healing remains to be done.
It still hurts to see those pictures.
