Rethink.

The events are real enough. I'm still debating what role 9/11 played in my thought and actions.

I had class at Rutgers in New Brunswick, NJ early that morning. My dorm two years before had a clear view of the New York skyline; I used to get up in the morning sophomore year and the Twin Towers would stare back at me.

This was supposed to be my senior year. The class was Romantic Movement: Comparative Literature. It was one of a total of 3 literature classes I took in undergrad (the other ones - one on Tolkien, the other on the close reading of poetry). I learned quite a bit in that class, but not that morning. I'm pretty sure I was in class when the first plane hit, probably barely awake. It wasn't terribly sunny when I first went outside that morning, but when I left class - probably around 9:30, I'm thinking - it was very bright out.

Rutgers can sometimes feel like it is a genuine school. Class was in Murray Hall, an older building on a part of campus that can be very picturesque. Large trees provided shade in spots, but the grass, flowers, statues and plaques were all kept up well; on sunny mornings, there was definitely a feeling that one was part of a legacy, a major research university giving America the leaders of tomorrow or some crap.

I remember feeling like I had places to go, people to see that morning. I wanted very much to go to the library for some reason. I rushed out of class, headed to my apartment. My roommate mentioned something awful happening on the news (did this happen before or after class? I can't recall), I didn't want to sit and watch it, I wanted to be out and about.

I'm actually looking at an old journal right now, with the entry dated 9.11.2001, and it looks like I was out and about that morning - I had breakfast after class at Au Bon Pain, went to the library after that. I think I know whom I was trying to run into that morning. There is incredibly sappy prose in this journal from a love letter I wrote and the stuff surrounding the love letter.

It was when I got to the library people were like "you didn't know? school's closed. Something's happening." I went back to my apartment yet again, and this time the security guard was telling us all to go up to the top floor and watch the columns of smoke rising from where the Towers were. That smoke wouldn't settle down for a day or two. We just sat glued to the TV wondering what else had happened. It wasn't clear what happened on Flight 93 immediately, it took a little while for those pieces to come together, the first report was that a plane was down. That a plane had hit the Pentagon we knew about, but that threat about a bomb somewhere in DC was floating around too.

Everyone in New Brunswick knew someone who worked at the WTC. Everyone was trying to call New York all at the same time.

I was watching TV all day afterwards, I remember that. Tom Brokaw asked Gen. Schwarzkopf if our policies toward Israel caused this. My mom saw the restricted flight map and noted that there were still an insanely high number of planes in the sky. The next part of the journal is me taking a walk at midnight and watching people hold some sort of crude disorganized vigil in the nice area where class that morning was. It was completely dark and one got a sense of loss, but reverence was being reached at. There was a drum circle elsewhere. Everyone else around the dorms spent their night off laughing and playing frisbee and hanging out. The prose shifts back to me whining about the girl, but she's the only thing forgotten from that day, truly.

I remember watching emergency vehicles rush from God-knows-where at that hour toward New York and wondering how many more people were going to die just dealing with the colossal wreckage. The stories of firemen going into the building knowing full well they weren't coming out were still fresh in my mind.

Despite my ability to recall what courses I took, I can safely tell you that I didn't learn much of anything during undergrad, except how to read a poem. The sappy love letters would turn into poem commentaries later, but everything in those philosophy and political science classes has been forgotten and in some cases disowned. I'm thinking now a large reason for that was 9/11. I always was conservative and kept up with politics and knew Islamic terrorists did awful things daily. What I didn't realize fully was that it would take something like this to make Rutgers aware where Afghanistan or Iraq was on a map.

A few weeks later the US invaded Afghanistan and there was a significant-enough protest. I recalled a countercultural paper at Rutgers making fun of the search for Osama bin Laden when I first came to campus in 1998, seeming to assert that the embassy bombings were meaningless in some sense. Having dealt with protests by every ethnic group with a grievance under the sun, I think 9/11 drove home just how strange the academy was in an arrogant and remote way. A very well-educated cousin of mine from the UK would visit sometime later and remark that the only reason Americans were patriotic - including me - was 9/11, and her sentiment was shared by many I knew at school.

I finished up my coursework for that semester but was well-aware I hadn't really learned anything in 4 years. I had been introduced to some interesting concepts in logic and philosophy of mind, but most of the reading concerned with that I was doing outside of class for myself. I didn't bother too much with my political science coursework because there was no sense, as there is now, that there was a tradition of political philosophy where every major question had been treated seriously already. All I knew was that there were canonical thinkers and people had their opinions about them, but I didn't think anything of it, because it was never introduced to me as relevant for thinking about politics now.

Funny how trendiness has a way of completely ignoring reality. People crash planes into buildings and no one in the political science department has an explanation for that fanaticism other than "religion is bad" and "the US is bad." Even granting those two premises, one would need to be able to identify exactly what impulse is being played on that causes people to believe that holy war is a duty even when things are going well for them. Without being able to account for "pride," this is an impossible quest. 99% of understanding traditional thinkers is grappling with the problem of pride. Apparently, I had my pride and was already moving elsewhere.

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