Twenty-Five Years of Grief and Fury
by Joe Keady
10 September 2026
Most New Yorkers are actually pretty nice most of the time. We probably do drop more f-bombs annually per capita than most cities, but that usually has less to do with hostility than just maintaining the rhythm of how a lot of us talk. As far as that reputation for being rude and unfriendly, it’s just that we usually don’t like to waste time on bullshit. Life in New York is such a constant grind that it’s a cliché to even say so. Most people who have lived there for more than six months will tell you that even if we really love it, we also kind of hate it a lot of the time, and those two sentiments are in no way contradictory.
Among those of us who don’t own a weekend getaway in the Hamptons, there’s a general understanding that shit is tough, and people are generally aware that the next person having a crisis could just as well be themselves, so there’s a basic undercurrent of day-to-day solidarity that often gets overlooked. Just ask one person on a crowded subway platform how to get somewhere and you may be setting yourself up for competing answers from between four and eight different people, each with their own merits. See? Friendly.
Still, there are a lot of caveats here. Please take note of “most of us,” “usually,” and “for the most part.” Any time someone starts a sentence with “New Yorkers are,” you already know they’re trying to sell you something. Michael Bloomberg did that a lot during his seemingly endless tenure as mayor, and it bothered me to a degree that was proportionate to all of the other good reasons to dislike him combined. There is nothing you can say that describes every New Yorker. There are too many of us, and we come from literally every part of the globe.
One of the real perks of living there is that you can find just about any kind of food that exists anywhere, if you look hard enough. There’s an organized subculture for every kind of dance, sports, music, film, politics, or knitting style you can imagine. New York City is so fucking diverse that when linguists at the CUNY Grad Center began a long-term project of documenting endangered languages, they quickly realized that they often didn’t have to go far to do it: if there are only sixty people in the world who speak a given language, there’s a pretty good chance that four of them live in Queens.
So here I am making broad generalizations and then telling you there’s no way to generalize. You can call that bullshit, but I will go to my grave defending people’s right to contradict themselves. It’s what we all do. It’s only within my power to tell you about what I’ve seen from my own, internally changeable perspective. If you multiply that by 8.5 million New Yorkers (plus 13 million more in the metro area), you can start to get a sense of how impossible it is for all (or even most) of us ever to be on the same page.
We came pretty close once, though.
On 11 September 2001, I woke up in my South Williamsburg apartment to the sound of my roommate banging on my door because she’d heard on the radio that a plane had hit one of the towers. Half-asleep, I immediately thought of the time when a US Army bomber crashed (unintentionally) into the side of the Empire State Building in 1945. The 1977 blackout also came to mind. These kinds of events are not what you might call “good,” exactly, but they’re part of the city’s lore. No one wants to miss out on a thing like that. They’re like “where were you when JFK was shot?” kinds of moments but on New York City scale, which is still pretty fucking big.
I can hardly express what a gorgeous morning it was – probably about seventy degrees Fahrenheit with a slight breeze and blue sky in all directions. We had a direct sightline to the towers from our roof, but by the time we got up there, both buildings were spewing massive clouds of ash and debris. The radio had said one plane hit one building, so my roommate and I started kicking around theories to explain what we were looking at: Did the plane glance off one building and hit the other? Did it actually go all the way through one? The nagging, dark suspicion that this wasn’t done by a single plane—that it might have been deliberate—was confirmed pretty quickly once our other neighbors started joining us on the roof.
Because I knew about the bomber that hit the Empire State Building (which, famously, is still standing), I was only half serious when I said early on that it was amazing the towers hadn’t collapsed for all the damage they had taken. I still feel kind of bad about that. The World Trade Center was as old as I was, and the idea of it just disappearing didn’t even seem like a realistic possibility. Hollywood loves depicting the total destruction of Manhattan—I’m not going to say there aren’t people in the outer boroughs who have even quietly fantasized about it—but our city always felt eternal, invulnerable. A thing like that just couldn’t happen in real life. This was just a couple of years after David Letterman, via then-mayor Rudolf Giuliani, proposed a new, very popular official NYC motto: “We Can Kick Your City’s Ass!”
Our building was right below the Williamsburg Bridge, but it took me a while to realize that a lot of the noise I was hearing down below was coming from fire trucks, horns blazing, racing over the East River. At the time, there was so much to process that it took a few days to realize that those of us on that roof may have been among the last people to see some of those firefighters alive.
My roommate went back down to our apartment to get a radio because we were all still pretty confused about the details. While she was gone, the South Tower fell. Because it was so unimaginable, I could only comprehend it through metaphor: I thought about the mastectomy my aunt in Florida had recently had. The loss of a body part—something whose existence you once took for granted, something whose very absence might still feel like a presence—seemed pretty apt. And when my roommate came back with the radio, I could only point to where the tower had been. She gasped and immediately teared up.
When the North Tower fell, I again grasped for any available metaphor. Just a couple of months earlier, hundreds of people in Brooklyn and Queens had made a party out of watching the planned, early-morning implosion of the “Purina towers,” a pair of massive disused gas tanks in Greenpoint. Watching the demolition had been a goof in July—another, even more localized piece of city lore. One Tuesday morning in September it instantly became eerie and foreboding in retrospect.
And then there was nothing. Just smoke—endless smoke—blowing its way out to Coney Island, the Rockaways, eternity. I had never seen three thousand people die more or less simultaneously before. I couldn’t comprehend it because it wasn’t comprehensible. I thought of other people who had died before that. I lost my dad in July 1999 and an uncle a bit more than a year after that. Joey Ramone had died in April 2001. It seemed like their New York would always be a whole New York, somehow a more innocent New York, if you can imagine. Our New York—the New York of those of us still living—now seemed to have a permanent open wound. That sense of global invulnerability that most of us never even knew we felt had burned up and was now scattered somewhere over the Atlantic. I imagine its remains made it halfway to Portugal by lunchtime.
* * *
Even before the Bush administration had time to mobilize support for bombing other countries, it was obvious that what had happened would blow back on lots of innocent people. The only real question was the scale of the violence to come. By the time I left my apartment around 10:30 that morning, someone had already spray painted “Nuke the West Bank” in at least two places within a few blocks of my building. When I spoke to my then-girlfriend on the phone, she had already witnessed people threatening Sikh men, who were notably vulnerable at the time: most white New Yorkers had no idea that men in turbans usually aren’t Muslims, and a certain number of people couldn’t figure out how to process the shock, the fear, or the grief without attacking (mostly verbally) populations they assumed were responsible even before any evidence was available.
For the most belligerent people, the only accessible emotional response seemed to be anger. That was not limited to regular schmucks either. Giuliani, who had built an entire career on being an attack dog (not to say a giant bully), made a statement to the press that morning in which he went on at some length and in unambiguous language about how very, very angry he was at that moment. That part of his performance was instantly erased from the public record. He made other, more moderate statements over the course of the morning, and those seem to have survived intact.
I did also hear about people intervening in defense of people who “looked Muslim” or were a shade too dark-skinned to be perceived as innocent. My aunt in Queens, for one, later said that she had quietly told a guy to put a sock in it while she was walking home across the Queensboro Bridge because he was making noises about the “fucking Muslims.” But we shouldn’t kid ourselves: New York’s vaunted diversity also means that we’ve got a sizable asshole population, and many of them are a lot louder than average. It’s great that a lot of people responded with reflection and thoughtfulness, but it would be wishful thinking to try to pretend that there wasn’t also a kind of viciousness there from the start that only snowballed later.
When I ventured outside, it wasn’t to do anything in particular. I just felt a need to check out the mood. It became apparent over the following week that, for me, processing what had happened meant getting every possible story from everyone I knew: Where were you? How did you hear about it? Who were you with? What did you see? But at least for that morning, the atmosphere where I lived seemed oddly subdued (the aforementioned graffiti notwithstanding). There were almost no cars on the street, the bridges were closed, and the subways weren’t running. A lot of people were standing around gabbing on the sidewalks, and it’s the only time I can remember when it seemed like the entire city was talking about the same thing. After directly witnessing what had happened from within the tiny bubble of my six-unit walkup, it was the dull, quiet murmur on the street that drove home the scale of what had happened.
I was lucky that a group of people had gathered at a friend’s bookstore along the main strip in Williamsburg. In the minds of many, that neighborhood has been reduced to—maybe reviled as—the capital of über-hipsterdom during that period, but at least for a little while I had found a very down-to-Earth place to be. Everyone in the shop was sharing stories of people they had seen walking over one bridge or another to get home, and of other people offering them water or food, or just to talk to them for a little while. A friend described a guy who stepped off of the Brooklyn Bridge still covered in dust and in such a state of shock that he didn’t know where he was going until someone put their arm over his shoulder and helped him along. Meanwhile there was a rumor going around that a blood donation site had been set up at Grand Army Plaza (a bit more than an hour’s walk away), followed by a secondary rumor that the blood drive was already overwhelmed with volunteers. It wasn’t until later that day that it was clear the attack hadn’t led to an increased demand for blood: it just hadn’t left very many bleeding survivors.
Over the next two weeks or so, I rode my bike into Manhattan repeatedly. The subways remained shut down for a while, and not many people who didn’t live there were allowed below Fourteenth Street. Homemade, photocopied signs pleading for information about missing family members were pretty quickly plastered throughout the city on any available outdoor wall space—signs of desperation as work crews downtown continued digging for bodies, living or dead, intact or otherwise.
Union Square, two miles or so north of the World Trade Center, fulfilled its traditional role as the closest possible thing to a crossroads of the entire city: a place of encounters between people from far flung (or maybe not) places without much in common. Hundreds of candles illuminated an enormous, twenty-four-hour vigil that had emerged on the south side of the park amid a sprawling succession of makeshift memorials to our untimely deceased.
More than anything, people just talked to one another. Michael Shenker, a particularly outspoken member of the old-school Lower East Side squatter scene, championed what he called the Speakers Corner, where anyone could spout off for a few minutes at least (not necessarily without consequences), and other people would generally listen. The conversations were raw and heartfelt and most of the time driven by a gut-level need to understand each other. Finding community felt like a path to sanity amid a shared, horrible experience. All in all it was the most vulnerable mass gathering of New Yorkers I’ve ever seen, and I don’t want to imagine what it would take to reproduce that.
* * *
A lot of people point to our city as a bastion of liberalism, socialism, communism, hedonism, or whatever -ism is functioning as the right’s bogeyman of the day, but there have always been pockets (at least) of reactionary white folks scattered throughout. Among other things, those communities are overrepresented in the Fire Department of New York today, and were even more so in 2001. So it’s not really correct to say that the Bush administration and its henchmen wantonly abused the mourning of the entire city. Just most of the city. They never had too much difficulty finding genuinely grief-stricken families who were all too willing to endorse Bush’s program of exacting revenge on some—any—brown-skinned “evildoers” in other countries.
It’s fairly common for people from New York to describe it not as one big city so much as thousands of small towns piled on top of each other (another contradiction that’s really no contradiction at all). But so many things that were specific to our home on 11 September 2001 were almost instantly taken up as part of a national drama at a delirious pace. Rudolf Giuliani wasn’t just the our mayor anymore; now he was “America’s Mayor.” The attack itself was branded “9/11,” the scene as “Ground Zero,” both of which sucked all the complexity out of our lived experience. Tourists in Harley-Davidson t-shirts soon came from across the country just to catch a glimpse of the ruins. Conspiracy theorists lost their fucking minds. In February 2002, we were graced with a hastily organized World Economic Forum meeting, relocated from its usual secluded spot on the frosty slopes of Davos, Switzerland. Somehow the world’s most out-of-touch elites thought that what we needed was more of them around.
But most disorienting of all was that the thing so many of us had endured on the ground with a complicated mix of mourning, anger, empathy, and other emotions that I still can’t quite name was so quickly taken up as a rallying cry by a president who had lost New York State by a nearly two-to-one margin (and New York City by a remarkable 78% to 18%) less than a year before.
On 14 September 2001, Bush gave his infamous “bullhorn speech” from the site where the Twin Towers had until recently stood. The speech was extremely brief, yet it was one of the shrewdest bits of political staging and rhetoric in modern history.
Standing on a pile of rubble, the air hazy with soot, surrounded by men in hardhats, and with his arm draped over the shoulder of retired firefighter Robert Beckwith as though they had played varsity football together, Bush began with what sounded like a reasonably humble gesture of solidarity. He said that “America today is on bended knee in prayer for the people whose lives were lost here, for the workers who work here, for the families who mourn. This nation stands with the good people of New York City, and New Jersey and Connecticut.”
After that, however, he immediately framed the loss—and the coming response—on a much larger scale. He started to say, “As we mourn the loss of thousands of our citizens…” but a man’s voice in the distance interrupted him, shouting “We can’t hear you!” Bush cannily raised his voice and replied, “I can hear you!” eliciting a round of cheers. He continued, “I can hear you, the rest of the world hears you, and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!” prompting even more cheering, along with chants of “USA! USA!” from the adoring crowd.
Bush ended by elevating his overwhelmingly local audience to full membership in the national family: “Thank you for your hard work, thank you for making the nation proud, and may God bless America.” In a speech that lasted about a minute and a half, he managed to shift the focus from the specificity of the dead and their families “here” to “our citizens” and then to a nationwide invocation of a new, potentially global conflict.
It isn’t surprising that a US president would respond that way. The police and the military are this country’s traditional tools for resolving any conflict. Moreover, the fact that Al-Qaeda had targeted the Pentagon and Manhattan’s financial district made it rather clear that its own war was on US military and economic power. There was never any chance that the events of that day were going to remain local to DC and New York. What is striking about Bush’s speech is not that he rhetorically nationalized what had happened, but rather that he created the distinct impression that he had the enthusiastic support of an entire city’s worth of grieving New Yorkers in doing so. In a very short time, he was able to transform those men in hardhats into a kind of vanguard for the entire country—an astonishing achievement in a city so loathed by conservatives from sea to shining sea.
In the raw moments just after the attacks, there was a lot of confusion among some of the people who had previously thought not only that those buildings were invulnerable but that they themselves were too. That brand new experience of feeling like the world might be unsafe for them could have prompted some reflection in the immediate aftermath, and that reflection might even have been directed toward nurturing a deeper sense of empathy, had there been any will to do so.
Instead, we were all repeatedly told from the bully pulpit that “we”—the national “we” of the US of A, with all the customary implications of whiteness, Christianity, middle class status, and so on—were attacked because “they hate our freedom.” Whole countries that had nothing to do with the attacks were branded as “evil” and even rhetorically linked together in an incomprehensible “axis” despite the complicated, sometimes violently conflicting relationships between some of the named countries.
In late summer 2001, we were still only ten years out from the end of the Cold War, a roughly forty-five-year era of paranoia and absurd, jingoistic propaganda. Throughout that intervening decade, the Pentagon had continually struggled to justify the continued maintenance of the kind of budget that had supported it during the years when it was able to present the Soviet Union as an existential threat. Nonetheless, the old military infrastructure—and with it the old militaristic mindset—never really went away. It just kept a continual lookout for a new enemy to fill the empty space left when the Communist bloc collapsed.
Both because Bush’s personal fortune came from oil and because it was a well-established truism among US elites (not least of all within the Bush family) that the US needed to maintain strong military and economic alliances across Southwest Asia, the president did not want to blame Saudi Arabia, the home of fifteen of the nineteen hijackers, and he could not afford to openly state that he wanted to fill that post-Soviet void with Islam, despite the fact that he quickly took up the language of a “crusade” in the Middle East.
Amid those constraints, he settled on a different set of targets. The completely abstract concept of “terror”—something that the Pentagon’s conventional military infrastructure was in no way designed to combat—became the new ideological object. The nature of US media coverage of the Palestinian struggle against Israeli occupation had already done the work of linking the word “terrorism” above all with swarthy, inscrutable Muslims in the minds of many white people in the US, so Bush’s occasional statements trying to disassociate the two tended to ring hollow.
It was clear from early on that the geographical targets would lie somewhere between the Mediterranean and the Himalayas, and Afghanistan was by far the easiest to sell to the general public: it was already unpopular, particularly among liberals, due to the ruling Taliban regime’s genuinely horrific treatment of women. On top of that, the ruling Taliban had allowed Al-Qaeda to use Afghanistan as a kind of home base until bin Laden and co. were kicked out of the country following the September 11 attacks.
Rather than pausing to consider that twentieth century US interventions in Afghanistan and neighboring Iran had already had a destabilizing effect on both countries and thus contributed to the rise of brutal, theocratic regimes that would tolerate groups like Al-Qaeda, the US rapidly embarked on a path of vengeance—and a lot of people who had nothing to do with the attacks were made to feel the brunt of it. So much of that was done in the name of recompense for “the good people of New York City, and New Jersey and Connecticut.”
Arguably the most ludicrous expression of the far-right co-optation of New Yorkers’ grief came in February 2003, when Jeremy Glick, whose father was a Port Authority worker who died in the attack on the World Trade Center, ventured to appear on the nightly Fox News show The O’Reilly Factor. During the course of that discussion, Glick pointed out that the US had once trained the “parties involved” in carrying out the September 11 attacks, specifically citing the work of Bush’s own father, former CIA director and ex-president George H. W. Bush. For all he had lost, Glick was clear in his belief that the rush to invade Iraq was unjustified.
Host Bill O’Reilly, however, was having none of that. “What upsets me,” O’Reilly explained, “is that I don’t think your father would be approving of this.” Shortly after that, he went so far as to scold Glick, raising his voice and saying that “I’ve done more for [the 9/11 families] than you will ever hope to do, so you just keep your mouth shut!” He finally yelled out that “I’m more angry about [your father’s death] than you are!” before ordering his staff to “cut his mic.”
That exchange explains a lot about what had happened nationwide. Grief—the kind of deep, personal loss felt by Glick and, to varying degrees, by thousands of others in the wake of the September 11 attacks—is about as complicated an emotional state as humans ever experience. It’s not even a single emotion; it’s a whole complex of emotions, and it changes from moment to moment, often without warning. It includes sadness, yes, but it can also evoke fear, humility, longing, and just about anything else—bouts of awe, laughter, and even joy are not unusual in the shadow of loss. It’s complicated, it’s nuanced, and it’s often subtle.
Anger can also be part of grief for any number of reasons. It’s reasonable. Loss often feels unjust. Sometimes it is, in fact, demonstrably unjust.
For a pompous, emotionally stunted authoritarian like O’Reilly, however, anger is the only option. All the complexity, all the nuance, all the free-form feeling is stripped away and replaced with a raw desire for retribution. That, clearly, is a likely result when a person’s worldview originates from an urge to dominate, and someone else does something that destabilizes their world. While most New Yorkers had, in an instant, stopped thinking of kicking other cities’ ass as a marker of their own worth, there evidently were still many who could think of nothing else.
* * *
About two weeks after the attacks, as smoke was still billowing out of the rubble in lower Manhattan and the air still had an acrid, throat-burning tinge even across the river in Brooklyn, representatives of the newly sainted New York Police Department began telling people in Union Square that the city administration was going to dismantle the physical infrastructure of grief they had built. They told us that the candles, the memorials, the signs, all of it, was going to the Smithsonian. Not a soul believed them. One night, it all disappeared. There was lots of shouting, but no one had the heart to really fight with the crews that came to take it all away. After all, those city workers were grieving too.
There were some attempts to reestablish what we had at Union Square, but they didn’t get very far. Michael Shenker was particularly incensed. He tried to keep the Speakers Corner going at Washington Square, but that petered out after a while too.
Just as Giuliani did by erasing the vigil at Union Square, Bush soon called on the country to “return almost to normal” and above all to keep shopping. Bush—at the time the dumbest US president in living memory—boiled the complicated stew of emotions still simmering in our guts down to soulless, self-flattering contrivances like “American resolve” while inducing shocking numbers of grown adults to begin talking about “evildoers” and “bad guys” on TV with a straight face.
On 20 September 2001, Bush gave a speech before a joint session of Congress. That night, he formally identified Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden as the perpetrators. He also announced an upcoming shakeup of the national security infrastructure and the creation of the brand new Office of Homeland Security, predecessor to the Department of Homeland Security. That was also the speech in which he declared that “Our grief has turned to anger, and anger to resolution. Whether we bring our enemies to justice, or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.”
Clearly O’Reilly was no outlier.
At some point during the twenty-seven days between September 11 and the invasion of Afghanistan on 7 October, I met a few family members at a bar. Things are a bit hazy given the quarter century that has passed since then, but I do remember a few key points. Specifically I remember the outright hostility from certain close relations when I bothered to suggest that maybe killing lots of people who had nothing to do with it wasn’t a good idea. That was frustrating, but my expectations were pretty modest to begin with.
The real heartbreak of the evening was prompted by my aunt from Queens—the same one who had told the guy on the Queensboro Bridge to stick it. She had always been a voice of reason and decency in my family, but the guy she married in the mid-1980s eventually became a regular Rush Limbaugh listener and a rather aggressive Giuliani fan. My good-hearted aunt was really devoted to her husband, and some of his worldview seemed to have rubbed off. That uncle had died in 2000, and my aunt was still pretty broken up about it in late 2001. She took to swooning over Giuliani’s persona during the post-9/11 era and was taken in completely by theatrics like Bush traveling to Iraq in November 2003 to surprise some troops by serving them turkey dinner on Thanksgiving. She couldn’t stop talking about how “cool” that was.
That night at the bar, things were generally pretty tense. The invasion of Afghanistan was a question of when, not if, and the inexplicable comments about “weapons of mass destruction” that were already coming from Bush and defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld just didn’t seem like they could apply to the Taliban, a regime that was still using the rifles the US had given them to fight the Soviets in the 1980s.
So when I went so far as to mention some reporting I had seen that was critical of the rush to war, my beloved aunt drew the conversation to a dead stop in five words: “But the media is liberal.” There was nothing more to say. A new cycle of destruction was clearly going to run its course no matter what. If even my eminently reasonable aunt had lost her mind, then who could be trusted? We—again the national “we” with all the customary implications—were wild with fury, and there was no logic that could turn that around. Lots more people were going to die needlessly before the collective psychosis passed. I went home that night sad, terrified and, yes, also filled with rage. But it wasn’t the same rage as theirs. I’d already watched so much senseless killing in real life, and now I was going to be forced to watch untold more lives taken on TV, on my own behalf.
Watching three thousand people die more or less simultaneously will do strange things to a person. It took me years to figure out that it had changed me. It took that long because there just wasn’t time to grieve properly. That process was taken away from us all. Who had time to deal with it? There were wars to fight.
Featured image: “Nothing but Blue Skies,” acrylic paint on ink jet print by Reeve Schumacher (2015). This artwork was part of a 2016 exhibition curated by Mélanie Bellue and Sam Stourdzé in Arles, France, reflecting on the standardized and endlessly repeated mass media depictions of the September 11 attacks as a “symbolic erosion” and “violence against images.”
