On the morning of 09/11/2001 I got up and drive to work across the San Francisco Bay Bridge, just as I had been doing every weekday morning for months. I was working on a condo project in a San Francisco high rise. On the way, I started to hear some weird news about a building in New York that had been hit by an airplane. By the time work started, we were hearing more. It wasn’t an accident; it was a planned attack. Nobody knew what was going on. Nobody knew if buildings in San Francisco would be attacked too, so after an hour they shut our job down Driving back across the bridge I fell in behind a large truck. I let it get a quarter mile ahead of me. For all I knew, it might be carrying explosives.

Then I got home and turned on the TV and saw what was happening. First one airliner hit the World Trade Center, then another. That in itself was shocking enough. But then… A building collapsed! I was glued to the TV as they showed it over and over. “Holy shit,” I kept on saying. I must have watched the same scenes nonstop for hours on end.

Everything had changed, but I didn’t know what. One thing I never thought was that “America deserved this.” Not then. Not later. Not like that asshole Hasan Piker. How could anybody even think that, never mind say it, knowing that thousands of people – ordinary workers – must have died? I don’t care if he retracted it the next day. It just shows that he’s totally out of touch with ordinary, working class people. Let the asshold apologize to the families of those who were killed – not on TV, but in person to their faces. But I doubt he has the integrity or the courage to do that.

Now that I’ve gotten my personal memories and feelings off my chest…

The “Battle of Seattle”

In all the coverage of 9/11, the situation prior to it has been wiped from historic memory. In the years prior to that date, there was a rising movement against “globalization”. It originated mainly among the youth, who organized a series of protests for several years. Then, in 1999, the World Trade Organization (WTO) held its annual conference. It was in Seattle that year, and all sorts of youth groups planned a protest, but not just any protest; they planned to shut down the WTO. The U.S. steel industry had been particularly hard hit by globalization and plant closings. So leadership of the Steelworkers Union decided to organize their members to join them.

The leadership planned a nice, safe and ineffectual little rally in a stadium far away from downtown Seattle, where the WTO was meeting. But the members had a different idea. At a key moment, when the union leadership’s stewards were trying to herd the membership away from the youth march to downtown, the membership rebelled. They joined the youth and marched downtown with them.

All hell broke loose. Downtown Seattle’s air was filled with tear gas. The WTO had to disband and scurry out of town. It was a huge victory for the anti-globalization uprising. So much so that the U. S. union leadership never joined forces with a radical youth-led movement again.

The G8 protest in Genoa

That didn’t stop the movement. In July of 2001, the G7-G8 summit met in Genoa. The protest there was even bigger than the Battle of Seattle. According to Wikipedia, an estimated 200,000 protested. One protester, 23 year-old Carlo Giuliani was shot and killed by Italian carabinieri Marco Placancia. He was then run over twice by military vehicles. According to the offician inquery, Placancia fired into the air but his bullet was reflected by a stone that was thrown and it ricocheted to hit Giuliani.

The uproar over the killing of Giuliani only added steam to the building movement.

Then 9/11 hit. The entire movement collapsed overnight. The United States was swept by a tsunami of patriotism, a feeling of national unity. It set the grounds first for the invasion of Afghanistan and then the invasion of Iraq. It was years before the movement against capitalism started to recover.

September 11, 2001 was a disaster for tens of thousands of families, both those killed in the attack and those who died for toxic smoke inhalation later. It was also a disaster for the movement.

Socialists should learn the lesson from that. Individual terrorism always sets back any popular movement. It always gives an excuse for the oppressors to become even more oppressive. Socialists should learn that lesson from 9/11.