I became a New Yorker on 9/12: Rajiv Joseph remembers 9/11

I was working for a dot com company in Midtown Manhattan. A television was brought into the coffee lounge and together we watch the second tower fall. Then we left work. Everyone in Midtown was filing out of their offices.  There was no traffic, no subways or busses, and so the streets were filled with people, quietly walking north into Central Park. I went to a friend’s apartment and we sat in front of the television all day, waiting for worse and worse news, that kept coming. It took the greater part of the day for the events to sink in, for me to grasp the terror and sadness of the event. Rudy Giuliani may have since tarnished his political reputation by exploiting the events of that day, but I will never forget his stunning leadership. It was a day that demanded a leader, and the Mayor was the only politician in the entire country who assumed that role. 9/11 is actually never far from my thoughts. I think about that day all the time. I had been living in New York for exactly one year, and I hadn’t quite grown accustomed to the city. I became a New Yorker on 9/12. [caption id=“attachment_81991” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Rajiv Joseph.”] [/caption]  For me, it is important to always remember the feelings of that day, the reality of the situation, the fear we all shared and the bravery of the first responders. Clearly, the day set the stage for the next ten years. As Americans, we are still paying the price for the Bush Administration’s calamitous response to 9/11. Nothing that happened on that day was even remotely associated with the country of Iraq, and yet there we went, attacking a country that posed no threat to us. _Rajiv Joseph is an American playwright and his “_Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo” was a 2010 Pulitzer Prize finalist for drama. His darkly comic “Bengal Tiger” about the Iraq war played on Broadway this year starring Robin Williams.