What 9/11 Taught Me About Community

I was a junior at Monmouth in the fall of 2001, living in the appropriately named Great Lawn apartments, because of the enormous field separating the complex from the rest of campus. It was a normal Tuesday, in that I had an insanely difficult individual workout that was clouding my mind since my eyes opened. My coach, Mark Calzonetti, put me through sessions that were an hour of physical and emotional abuse under the facade of player development. Years later, I would realize that man was responsible for a huge part of why I eventually became tough enough to survive professional basketball overseas. At the time though…I mostly thought he was an asshole.

That morning my brain was already mentally preparing for this bullshit. That was the biggest thing hanging over my day. Class….workout….try not to die….attempt to eat something afterward.

Then I walked through the apartment half-awake and looked at the TV…

One of the iconic symbols of America, the Twin Towers, was smoking. I stopped for a second, still trying to figure out what in the fuck I was looking at…then the second plane hit. That moment, whatever confusion existed was gone. It was crystal fucking clear that we were under attack. 

There were probably ten of us packed around one television in that Great Lawn apartment trying to understand. Nobody had a smartphone or was refreshing social media…just a TV and whoever had just heard something from somebody else.

What I remember most is the fear…I was scared shitless.

Watching the towers smoke and then eventually collapse was so overwhelming that I kept going outside and looking up at the sky. We had been told to stay inside because nobody knew if more planes were coming…which of course meant my brain immediately became convinced there were more planes coming. I genuinely thought another one could come screaming out of the sky straight toward us.

Nobody knew if New York was the end of it…Washington had been hit, and reports were coming from everywhere. You didn’t know if Philadelphia was next, or a nuclear plant, or a bridge, or whatever else my twenty-one-year-old brain could invent after watching two buildings full of people collapse on live television.

I grew up in the 80s, when adults had convinced us danger was basically everywhere, but also incredibly specific. I avoided strangers in vans, any form of quicksand…My parents thoroughly checked for razor blades in my Halloween candy, and I was definitely not going to be snatched up by some guy offering me drugs outside school for absolutely no financial benefit to himself.

That was the shit we were prepared for. Nobody prepared you to watch thousands of people go to work on a Tuesday morning and never come home.

At some point we drove up to Atlantic Highlands, where you could look across the water toward Manhattan. The smoke was still there. I remember staring at it, feeling completely fucking useless. There were people underneath that smoke… trapped, dead, or dying. HEROES were running into something everybody else was desperately trying to escape.

I wanted to do something. I remember feeling like I should somehow get over there and start pulling people out myself, which obviously made absolutely no sense. I was a skinny college basketball player from South Jersey with no training and no idea what the hell I would have done once I got there…but standing there doing nothing felt hopeless.

Then it started getting closer to us personally. People knew people who worked in the towers. Everyone was trying to figure out who had made it out and who hadn’t. My girlfriend’s close friend was on one of the planes. These weren’t just people on television anymore.

For the next week, people were around each other constantly, which is what I remember clearly now. I couldn’t tell you what workout I was supposed to do that morning, nor do I remember what classes I missed. But I clearly remember ten people crammed around one TV, checking on each other, calling people, trying to make sense of something none of us understood. I remember being scared and not really knowing what to do with that fear, so we were just together.

It took me a long time to understand how important that was. Then, a few years later, I started playing basketball overseas, and suddenly I was seeing America from the outside.

I met people who loved America, people who hated America, people who were fascinated by it, and people who had developed their entire opinion of the country from television, politics, conspiracy theories, or whatever insane shit somebody had told them on social media.

I heard theories about 9/11. I heard people explain America to me who had never fucking been there. I heard people talk about Americans like we were one giant group of people who all thought the same way, voted the same way, lived the same way, and believed the same things.

Sometimes I argued, other times I just laughed it off. Sometimes I just sat there thinking, You have no fucking idea what you’re talking about. Because when they talked about America, they were talking about a concept…I was thinking about people.

I was thinking about my community. The people sitting around that television with me, or the people who went to work that Tuesday morning like it was just a normal day. The heroes that gave their lives to help others…that was America to me.

And the further away I got from it, the more I understood how much it meant to me. 

Living overseas taught me a shit ton. It showed me how much bullshit foreign people believe about Americans and…in turn…what we believe about the rest of the world. We make assumptions about places we have never been, cultures we don’t understand, and people we have never bothered to meet. Then somebody from that culture shares a court with you, and suddenly all that propaganda gets a lot harder to believe. That became one of the biggest lessons of my career. Countries are governments on maps until you know the people…then they become communities.

Twenty-five years later, when I think about September 11th, that’s what remains. I remember the fear, the smoke, and the feeling that the world had suddenly become a much scarier place. But I also remember ten of us packed around one television. I remember everybody wanting to help even when nobody knew what the hell to do.

I remember my community. I spent the next decade being dropped into new ones all over the world, and every place taught me basically the same thing…people need people.

That idea has probably shaped more of my life than I realized at the time, and it is a huge part of why I care so much about building community now.

You can disagree about almost everything. You can come from completely different places…but when things get bad, you find out pretty quickly what matters.

The people around you.