Today marks the 25th anniversary of 911, and although I seem to have lived so many lives since then, it still feels like it was yesterday. What was I up to on that September morning? I was 23 and a graduate student in Upstate New York. I had woken up super early to have breakfast with my roommate, Betül, another graduate student, and a friend of hers who was visiting us from another upstate school. As grad students, we were poor as church mice, but Binghamton was inexpensive, so we lived in a beautiful apartment in a Victorian house. In our spacious kitchen that morning, we prepared a generous Turkish breakfast for our house guest: plenty of bread, the good white cheese, olives, a spicy tomato spread I loved, probably eggs and cold cuts, maybe a spinach pie. I don’t remember what all was involved, but these breakfasts were one of my favorite things about living with a Turkish roommate, so I sat there sleepy and bleary eyed and tried to wake up with the strong black tea from the double decker teapot that was yet another perk of my living situation. After breakfast, our guest left, and I reluctantly retreated to my room where I had to code data using some awful statistics software for a meeting I had with one of my professors that day. I don’t mean to be grim, but international relations data is really all about counting battle deaths in order to decide if an event counts as a war or not. Let me not even get into the many ways that field of study disappointed me. It would become more and more obvious as the day progressed.
Betül had taken her second cup of tea to our living room and was watching TV. I was low key resentful, because frankly, I would have done anything other than count battle deaths and enter numbers into a spreadsheet. But I guess I still naively believed that my studies would somehow lead to making the world better and more peaceful. Meanwhile the world was fixin’a implode.
Betül called to me from the living room. “Come quickly, two planes crashed into the World Trade Center!” I was like, what? Well, that’s a hell of an accident. We watched together as the second tower collapsed. I don’t remember our initial reaction. I do remember wanting to stay with her to watch more and frankly just to cling to each other for comfort, but I felt guilty about not coding the spreadsheet with the battle deaths. (I felt guilty all the time back then, because I believed my studies were important, but I was not enjoying them at all.)
Then it occurred to me that my professor, an internationally renowned expert in conflict and terrorism (terrorism!!!) would surely have better things to do on such a day than to talk to me. I mean, would a terrorism expert not chime in on the news? Would he not meet other experts and come up with a plan to keep us all safe? Would he not be busy saving the fucking world?
It was hard to get people on the phone (no dice calling my family in the city, or my family in Europe), but my local call to the school went through. I spoke to my professor and said that I understood he would be busy that day. Oh, sweet, naive being that I was! Mind you, I was 23, but I had accomplished a lot for that age and had lived by myself in not one, but three foreign countries. I had rented apartments, taken out massive loans, and gotten into a PhD program. I was no silly little thing. But I held on to some idealistic notions. Chief among them, the idea that international relations scholars work diligently towards producing sustainable peace. (In fact, they work diligently towards producing replicable studies, which nobody outside the discipline bothers to read.)
My professor said that clearly we should reschedule our meeting. Then he said he was not busy, but that he was upset. It was starting to dawn on me that international relations scholars do not actually try to save the world, and that knowledge was unpleasant. Why torture myself with counting battle deaths then?
But it wasn’t a day to assess the purpose of my studies. It was a day to binge watch the same news segments over and over, cry with my roommate, experience dread, and obsessively call my family in the city. I got through eventually. They were ok. My aunt wanted to walk across the bridge to Manhattan because the subway was closed and she thought maybe they would need her at work. As she was not a first responder, we convinced her to stay home.
As evening approached, the atmosphere grew even more eerie. My roommate and I huddled around the TV with a bunch of friends. The attacks scared us, but some of the anti-Muslim sentiment we heard expressed scared us too. My roommate was Muslim as were some of our friends. Someone in Binghamton fired shots at the local mosque that evening. We were scared and sad and that night we both slept in her room, in her bed, because we didn’t want to be alone. We also scraped the crescent moon sticker off the clunker of a car my roommate shared with another graduate student. I think the sticker was for the Turkish Student Association or some similar group having everything to do with cultural diversity in our university and nothing with religion and politics, but we wanted to be on the safe side.
The next day we went to donate blood at the Student Union. I got turned away because I had been to England that summer for statistics camp (you can imagine how much fun that was!) and there were some concerns about Mad Cow disease. I donated $6 instead. It was all the cash I had on me. My roommate was successful in giving blood. We still felt very helpless and stupid after our attempts to help and we returned home to cry and be afraid of everything. Though I had to accept that, as days went by I did have to return to coding battle deaths and prepare for my meeting with the terrorism expert who was not saving the world.
All bridges to the city were closed. As soon as they opened my cousin offered me a ride but I said no. I didn’t want to go there. There was black smoke rising up from Ground Zero, visible miles outside the city. Everyone was sad. I figured I could be sad upstate. And nobody wanted my mad cow blood anyway.
Then my dad called to say my grandma was coming from Europe to see us. She was 80 years old, spoke no English, and was deathly afraid of flying, but she had somehow gotten herself on one of the first flights that were allowed to land in New York and she was headed our way. There were armed soldiers on the plane. Everything was weird, everything suddenly seemed more dangerous. Flying was almost like taking a bus before, now there was a ton of security and you couldn’t smoke on planes anymore either (that part, I definitely don’t mind). Anyway, I hitched a ride into the city, saw the black column of smoke, and partook in the general sadness. Of course, my grandmother got there before I did. And even under the circumstances, her presence was quite fortifying.
I changed my focus in the PhD program from international relations to Comparative Politics. I had a better time with survey level data about people participating in protests, than with counting battle deaths. But somewhere the disappointment lingered that scholars don’t truly try to save the world. Not through research, at least. I found that teaching did, in fact, make a difference. And then, after years of talking to young people and motivating them to learn and do exciting things with their lives, I decided that art and fiction are the things I am best suited for, and that they are indeed legitimate ways to make an impact. Like 25 years ago, the world is dangerous, volatile, unnecessarily violent. But I do think we should each try hard to save it each and every day.
