Remembering 9/11

September 12, 1994 was a Monday. Andre Agassi had won the U.S. open tennis championship the previous day. I caught the 5:36 am train from Port Washington N.Y. (north shore of Long Island) to Penn Station and then the "E" train subway to the World Trade Center. Three elevators and 104 floors later (I used to joke that my vertical commute took about just as long as my horizontal commute!) and at about 6:45 am I took my post on the Canadian bond desk at Cantor Fitzgerald. We were situated right at the window on the northeast corner. Although my back was facing it, if I swiveled in my chair, that photo above was pretty much my view.

Seven years later, to the day, the attack on the World Trade Center took place. With good fortune, I had been recruited to return to Toronto in the spring of 1995 to work at the investment dealer Richardson Greenshields. To this day I always take a moment to remember my good friend, currently a client and member of our advisory board at High Rock who helped convince me to make the move back. He probably saved my life. However, there were a great number of former friends and colleagues who did not have the same good fortune, including the two really excellent gentlemen who managed our division, Don Robson and Joe Shea. 

A number of good friends and former colleagues had also had the good fortune to have found other opportunities since I had left and the whole Canadian bond desk had been relocated to Toronto. Nonetheless, we lost some really good folks on 9/11 because anybody who reported to work at Cantor Fitzgerald on time that day was lost.

My experience is nothing relative to the family members and friends who were significantly closer to those who were lost, but it still remains personal, these 17 years later.

Watching the events unfold on television on that day was surreal, like watching some fictional thriller. Unfortunately it was not fiction.

I do remember in the after-math, that there was a great deal of unity and reaching out across political and religious lines and of people showing a great deal of their humanitarian virtues.

At times, as we move farther away from 2001, it appears that some of those wonderful virtues have receded and we do not make the same efforts to find compromise around politics and religion.

For me, remembering 9/11 (i.e. "Never Forget"), is about how we all came together in response and became, for a time, significantly more tolerant of each other, despite the vast differences in our views and opinions.

I find the news headlines, opinion columns and blogs of more recent times to be full of an enormous lack of tolerance for those who might have a different perspective.

Perhaps we are forgetting a little of what 9/11 taught us. I think we all need to think back to that terrible day and remember how it made those of us who survived become better people.