Memories of September 11

In September of 2001, I had just started work as the editorial pages editor at the Varsity, the University of Toronto student newspaper. I had recently abandoned my plans for graduate studies at the school and turned down an offer to study journalism at Ryerson. I was determined to break into a journalism career the old fashion way, through hard work and determination. The job at the Varsity was my first salaried gig but I was also freelancing for a start up mag, called Digital Journal, and a handful of others. But it wasn’t enough to cover rent in downtown Toronto. So two days a week I was also delivering the Varsity downtown and on the universities two satellite campuses in Scarborough and Mississauga. 

A coworker and I were in the delivery van when we heard the news. We had been listening to a call in show on the campus radio station. A frantic listener called in to say that a plane had just hit the World Trade Center. We didn’t think much of it at the time. For some reason I pictured a small plane hitting the tower. More and more people started to call in with more details. That’s when we switched to the CBC news. I remember the guy in the van with me wondering aloud what the Americans would do in response. “What are they gonna do now,” he’d ask? He asked that same question over and over in a half dozen different ways. I just sat there. Driving. Listening.

We kept on delivering the newspapers, but it was hard to imagine that anyone was going to read them. I remember dropping bundles of newspapers into racks and thinking that nearly the same number would be there when I returned in a few days with the next issue (it came out twice a week). For some reason I was really focused on the effort that we had put into that newspaper and the fact that it had been wasted. It seems so silly in retrospect.     

I didn’t actually see the images of the towers falling until I was returning the van several hours later. The rental agency was at a shopping mall and I saw the reruns on the big screen at a cell phone store. A huge crowd had gathered around the screen, but I felt like I was the only person watching it for the first time.  

At the time, I was very focused on the anti-globalization movement. The protests the previous spring in Quebec City had made quite an impression and, at the time, it really felt as though major changes were a foot. But that protest, and the discontent that had given rise to it, suddenly seemed so complicated in the wake of September 11. In fact, one of the first issues I had to deal with as an editor were complaints about an anti-globalization essay we published in the issue I had been delivering. In the original piece –written before September 11 – an activist named Alex Kerner had said that we needed to “turn the campus into a war zone against corporate rule.”  It was an innocent enough statement, for the time, and would have received no attention if not for the events of that day. 
 

For some reason this also struck me. All of the issues that had been with us before September 11th were still with us, but they would be viewed through a different filter.