Truly Hell is lying in wait- a destination for the transgressors.
[an-Naba, 78: 21-22], The Q’ran
When I was living out in New York (before making the STUPID mistake of coming back to Illinois) I got to know a lot of people who were directly affected by the suicide pilots on 9/11. The people I met either survived the fall of the Twin Towers, had friends or family who weren’t so fortunate, or witnessed the whole thing first hand. Hell, just by being in New York on September 11, 2001 and living through the pandemonium, these people’s lives were forever changed.
I have vivid memories of one particular morning when I was heading to work. I was moving through my daily anything-but-mundane routine, riding the 1-train from the Upper West Side to Chinatown. (None of that Brooklyn shit going on here. I’m not moving to the east coast just to live in the fucking suburbs. Can’t afford Manhattan? Then don’t move to New York.)
I used to sit on the subway with my earbuds on, with the express purpose of drowning out the crazies around me. Luckily, this is the norm in the Big Apple, as well as accommodating people as they get on the train. If you’re standing in front of the sliding doors, and you see people trying to get on at the next stop, then you move inwards toward the center to avoid having to make people walk around you. Even the most coldhearted people on the planet have this basic etiquette down to a science in New York. Take a lesson, you clueless suburbanites riding the El in Chicago. But I digress.
On this particular day, who should be sitting further down the bench from me, but one of those conspiracy theory nutjobs, going off on a less-than-eloquent polemic about a supposed New World Order in “Jew York City” and around the world. The allegation this time? 9/11 being an inside job (despite an admission in front of the entire global community on Al-Jazeera from one of the biggest “Muslim” zealot sociopaths ever to walk the planet). Most commuters ignored this corpulent, middle aged bigot, while I cast harsh judgment on the likelihood that this whackjob had never actually worked a day in his life aside from a oddjob retail gigs, watched Glenn Beck religiously in his mother’s basement, and hadn’t bathed in nearly a week.
The young lady sitting across from him, however, took things a little more to heart than the rest of us on the train. She had a rather petite figure, probably around my age, 21-22 at the time, curly brown hair spouting from a scrunchy the middle of her scalp (not unlike an 80’s side ponytail), with a very, very uptown New Yorker accent. Think Mike Meyers in mid-1990’s Saturday Night Live Coffee Talk. In an absolutely flabbgergasted display of acknowledgment, she yelled, “I’m so sick of hearing you tawk, Shut your fat ass up before I knock your fucking teeth in!”
This young banshee’s shriek was enough to get everyone on the cart’s attention, while the sheer disdain she showed toward this 40-year-old virgin would have been enough to make every commuter from here to Coney Island burst out in a laud of clapping and raving. An empowered African American businesswoman in a suit shouted, “You go, girl!” not unlike an offensive stereotype, while a group of Latino teenage boys stood bug-eyed in the middle of the aisle, half-smiling mouths gaping wide open.
The fat guy looked over at the angry woman who was about a quarter of his size, seemingly surprised at the rare occurrence that a commuter so much as recognized the existence of a public nuisance on the train. He gulped rather visibly, his Adams-apple bobbing in distress. We approached the next stop less than 5 seconds later, and the man grabbed his “Question 9/11!” sign and waddled out onto the platform without saying much of anything else.
Upon his exit, several individuals commended the young lady for putting him in his place, among them a teenage Puerto Rican girl in a neon green P.S. 1 Day Camp counselor t-shirt. Our heroine explained that her uncle had perished on the 50-something floor of Tower One, which prompted the younger girl to share that her mother was a cleaning lady in Tower Two. Evidently, she had called a friend of hers in charge of cleaning the first 10 floors of Tower 1 to tell her an airplane had crashed into the building immediately after it happened, and that she should get out immediately. Less than 4 minutes later the second airplane hit the building she was in. She didn’t make it out.
And just like that, a group of about a dozen of the supposedly most unapproachable people on the planet bonded in their common effort to continue moving through their lives one day at a time after the biggest tragedy ever to hit the United States in over 50 years. I knew that I could never fully appreciate what they had gone through, and all that I could do was think about one of my teachers from high school whose son’s best friend was on the plane that was highjacked and rerouted for Camp David on that seemingly normal Tuesday morning. He and the other passengers had fought off al-Qaeda, regaining control of the airplane long enough to realize that the only to prevent more innocent deaths was to veer the plane a few miles off course, in spite of their imminent demise.
My heart went out to the people of New York two nights ago, when a friend of mine who was watching TV messaged me on GChat to tell me about the death of Osama Bin Laden. I thought about my friends, now NYU alumni, whose relatives worked on Wall Street. I thought about my old co-workers at the SoHo museum, who reached out to the children in the public schools for art therapy activities. But above all else, I thought about the outspoken damsel from the train, in anything but distress. These people have been given a sense of closure, knowing that the man who made sure there was one less person present for the remainder of their birthdays, Christmases, and family reunions, had been brought to justice.
My good friends who subscribe to far left political philosophies have been quick to point the finger back on the federal government when it comes to assigning blame for the travesty that occurred on September 11, 2001. Some have even gone so far as to condemn the rejoice taking place across the nation that resulted from an American Navy S.E.A.L. landing a bullet right between the sociopathic son of a bitch’s eye sockets. The conversations I have had with them have involved trying to convince them that condemning continued U.S. involvement in the Middle East and taking pride in the American military’s success in wiping the modern day anti-Christ off the face of the planet, are not mutually exclusive. We can be critical of this country’s long history of invasive diplomatic relations, while demanding that those who partake in organized criminal organizations, responsible for the loss of innocent lives, get what’s coming to them.
It’s times like these when a part of me hopes my atheism is the incorrect worldview on the possibility of an afterlife. If there is a hell, I like to think there is a special place reserved for extremists, fundamentalists, and monsters of all religious stripes.
Here lies the soiled name of Osama Bin Laden, a man who chose to use the rare combined gift of charisma and intellect for an inhumane, inhuman agenda. Rest in pieces. You won’t be missed.
