Thread by @johnpavlovitz

On September 11th I was working as an art director in Philadelphia.
I was walking through our artist studio when I heard Howard Stern on the radio say something casually about reports of a plane crash at the World Trade Center.

For a few seconds everyone on the show was speaking with almost glib curiosity, imagining it was a small private plane and speculating on what might have happened. Very quickly it became clear that this was something different.

I can remember standing in that spot for a long time, unable to move and barely breathing as they all gathered information in real-time. And I started to hear something in their voices I never heard before: genuine fear.

Soon, everyone in our building was running to the large downstairs atrium where TVs on large carts had already been rolled out. We gathered around them and watched in stunned silence, terrified and helpless, holding one another's hands and wiping away tears.

It wasn't long before I was speeding home to my wife, just 90 minutes from New York City and feeling like nothing around me was safe. Nothing seemed secure. Everything was unstable.

The grief of that day cannot be overstated and it can't be explained to those who did not experience it. It was path-altering for all of us and we knew it.

20 years later, I wish we'd learned more. I wish we'd remembered the connection of those days, the way we recognized our shared story and our responsibility to carry one another.

We are far less a united people than we were in those hours and weeks and months. We are now fighting one another far more than any foreign threat. We have forgotten our commonalities.

Today I'll be freshly grieving the horror of that day twenty years ago and those who died at the hands of unimaginable hatred.
But I'll also be grieving the reality that this same ugliness is now commonplace in America and that by far the greatest threat we face here is internal.