Six years ago today, I witnessed the collapse of the second tower of the World Trade Center from the corner of Canal St. and West Broadway. I woke up that morning, having crashed on a friend's couch after making flyers for a DJ show (I was a full-time DJ), to the blaring sound of an unusual amount of emergency vehicle sirens. Out the window was a scene out of King Kong, with panicked citizens running down Grand St., people crying, one woman vomiting on the street, others frantically dialing numbers on their cell phones.

My friend Alex — as low-key, calm, and unexcitable as they come — suddenly barged into the apartment. He was choked up, holding back tears and pointing at the TV, telling us to turn on NY One immediately. He was nearly hyperventilating. I asked him what had happened.

"A jet aircraft just flew into the World Trade Center."

"Huh!? A jet plane? It wasn't just a small private plane?"

"No, it was BIG! Turn on the TV..." He couldn't talk.

For some reason, maybe because the full picture of the event hadn't unfolded yet, I didn't go outside immediately to see what was going on. Instead I was just glued to NY One, waiting to get information about the crash into the first tower. But after the second plane hit, it was obvious what was going on wasn't an accident, and I felt I had to see the rest of it first-hand.

Tremendous numbers of emergency vehicles rolled in as they made their way down West Broadway towards the towers as the blaze and smoke grew more intense. They were from all over: Fort Lee, Bensonhurst, Queens — every part of the city was represented. While police and firefighters rolled slowly toward Ground Zero, people on the street were giving reports about other incidents around the country by word-of-mouth, some true, some not. Some reported that the Sears Tower had been hit. Word of the Pentagon attack made its way through the crowd, more planes crashed in Pennsylvania. Nobody knew what to believe. Everyone was anxious, trying to sift out what was true, shifting anxiously between conversations about events around the country, their attention then magnetically drawn back to the steadily increasing fire and smoke beginning to engulf the building.

After the collapse of the second tower — I was close enough to see all kinds of things I didn't want to, but far enough away that there was no immediate threat to my safety — people who had gathered slowly began to disperse. A giant cloud of yellowish smoke and haze engulfed lower Manhattan, making it hard to see anything. The mockingly beautiful day gave the scene the feeling of a horrible dream. After a bit, some who had escaped the collapse of the tower started to filter north towards where we were standing, covered in thick layers of white pasty residue. A middle-aged businessman stood for an interview by the Post. In typical New York gallows-humor-tough-guy fashion he claimed he was gonna ask for some money for his account in a jocular fashion, and then broke down into tears as he was helped off by some law enforcement officers.

After the collapse of the towers, I wandered lower Manhattan, stunned, unable to process what I had seen. What do you do after witnessing a macabre spectacle on an epic scale? Many stores brought out TV's onto the streets, and crowds would form around them and then disperse. My late 20's hipster instincts eventually led me north and east to the Lower East Side, and in my semi-trance like state I ended up on Avenue A and 14th, where artists were already at work painting a graffiti mural to honor the Towers and the victims, candlelight vigils already in place at their feet. Later in the afternoon, when subway service resumed, I grabbed an F train heading eastbound to Brooklyn.

The spirit of volunteerism ruled the day. It was most obviously present in the fire and police departments where people risked and gave their own lives, but it was also present in ordinary citizens' reactions to the event. A friend and I went to give blood at the Beth Israel Medical Center, but so many people had rushed to give blood that they weren't taking any more volunteers — in fact, hospital officials were instructing people to call others to notify them not to come down because there were too many donors. One of the hospital employees broke it down harrowingly: "There aren't many people that need blood. You either made it out or you didn't, and there just aren't that many wounded people."

That same night, still trying to sort out just what in God's name I had seen, I had my weekly DJ show at Frank's Lounge in Brooklyn, my home away from home in the city. That night, people danced their sorrows away, tried to laugh and celebrate life when it had been revealed as fragile, and it was maybe the most energetic night Frank's had ever seen.

In the days immediately following the attacks, most of my DJ gigs were shut down (they were mostly in lower Manhattan). Given what I had just witnessed, I didn't much feel like going to play music for entertainment purposes anyway. It felt wrong, and I didn't want to watch the TV broadcast and re-broadcast of the horrific footage of the planes striking the towers — it made me queasy — so I spent most of my time in my Clinton Hill apartment pacing and listening to the radio as new information rolled in. I couldn't sleep for days after the event, as in my mind I couldn't stop reliving the sounds and sights of the afternoon, imagining the horror of what it must have been like inside Windows on the World, or the inconsolable grief of those who had lost loved ones. The reality of the event and the possible consequences of the reaction to it started slowly settling in.

The next week or two was a blur of sorrow and confusion, walking around the city and seeing all the posters that families had put up searching for their loved ones. The acrid smell of the buildings still permeated the sky all the way down into the subway system, even from the outer boroughs. Everywhere in the city, there were flyers on kiosks looking for lost loved ones.

But if there was a silver lining to the cloud, it was that for the first time since I had moved to New York in 1998 that I had ever felt a genuine feeling of empathy or compassion among strangers there. People seemed less money-driven and greedy, more willing to listen, more caring, less cold. Strangers of all walks of life would talk to each other, tell stories, hug each other, and retell their experiences, united by grief in the wake of tragedy, until a certain point when they didn't feel like talking about it anymore and the best thing you could do was just try to fake it and get back into the swing of things. New York in the week after the attacks was as humane as I had ever witnessed it. People were angry, sad, grieving, but there were very few calls for revenge or retribution, mostly a city trying to comfort those who had been through tragedy. Mayor Hero, Rudy Giuliani, announced that the death toll would be "more than most of us can bear," and a city tried to figure out how to recover. One thing seemed clear — the clamor for revenge and blood and retribution was coming a lot louder from those outside the city than those that had actually witnessed the attack.

— Hillary Clinton, October 10th, 2002

More difficult than the memories of the attacks themselves was the way Bush, an empowered group of ideologues who had never seen war, and those blinded by their desire for blood, profits, or both spit in the face of the civilians and rescue workers who had perished in the 9/11 attacks. Personal tragedies were twisted into a rationale for justifying the impending multi-trillion dollar debacle in Iraq in the name of patriotism.

Equally infuriating was the numbing inability of journalists and government officials in opposition to the war to do anything to stop it, and the unwillingness of elected leaders to stand up for what was right by speaking out.

Prior to the unleashing of the "Shock and Awe" bombing raid as part of operation "Iraqi Freedom," I participated in two major protests against the war. The first was in Washington D.C. and the second in New York City in late August on the doorstep of the Republican National Convention. Both marches were organized and coordinated at least in part by International A.N.S.W.E.R.

Despite the hundreds of thousands of peaceful protestors, even at first glance upon arriving at the demonstrations you could feel they weren't going to stop anything. The protests' utter inability to maintain focus on the singular goal of trying to stop the war was as consternating as the right's contempt for reason, diplomacy, or constitutionality. At certain points I wondered if this group of protestors would be able to stop a condominium development project, much less the Bush White House.

Appeals to end the war ended up getting distorted or drowned out by the noise of the litany of Patti Smith performances, leftist platitudes, self-indulgent calls for revolution and legalized marijuana, adolescent fantasies of overthrowing capitalism, and 100 other causes that ranging from the worthy to the cringeworthy, none as urgent as the one at hand. The goddamned building was on fire, and it wasn't time for Chomskyist discourse about ending global imperialist hegemony. We didn't need another T-shirt with Che Guevara on it.

A.N.S.W.E.R.'s organizers seemed vain, out of touch, and politically unskilled; young, wannabe rock stars with little political savvy better suited to lead a college-level progressive club than to serve as the last line of defense against the well-oiled, money hungry and bloodthirsty Bush war crusade. Where were the power players on the leftt? Where was Schumer? Where was Hillary? Where were the centrists and the so-called "fiscal conservatives" to bring a sense of perspective to things? The left's voice was important but it needed to include the center as well if it wanted to be taken seriously.

With protestors able to garner little more than a 10-second news segment from cowed networks, other major news outlets or sources of opposition marginalized and unafraid to be depicted as unpatriotic, and the war seeming more and more inevitable, the last hope that reason would prevail at some point fell upon the 107th congress and the senators I helped put into office: Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer. But both, along with the majority of US senators, unsurprisingly caved.

I'm not a political analyst nor do I pretend or aspire to be one. But if I, a 28 year-old DJ about as far outside of the loop in Washington as possible, could smell that the whole WMD story was a cooked farce, surely two of the most powerful and connected Washington insiders had to have known it. Hillary's now-infamous quote that the war was probably the "hardest decision she had to make" made me retch. Looking back, you know the decision wasn't hard because she was afraid of being wrong about the evidence of WMD's. It was hard because she had to decide between endorsing the blatant lies being used as a rationale for an unjust war, or risking her own political ambitions by standing up and doing what was right.

— Rudolph Giuliani, 2004 Republican National Convention, August 30th

As someone who more often than not falls on the liberal side of the fence, prior to 9/11 I didn't exactly have a glowing opinion of then-mayor Giuliani. Watching his act on that day, or at least the media's glowing portrayal of it, caused me to temporarily reconsider my beliefs about him, or at the very least, caused me to be a bit more sympathetic to a mayor I had considered cruel, mean-spirited, and full of hot air previously. People naturally want to trust their elected leaders in a time of crisis, and Giuliani conveyed a sense of leadership that was needed. I was at least willing to listen at that point, maybe for the first time, to a leader previously associated with his reputation for brutality, racism, and cronyism.

That was short-lived. Slowly but surely after the 9/11 attacks, as the pieces fell into place, it became apparent that not even the deaths of some of his closest friends on that day were enough to stop Rudy from permanently cementing his place in the Scumbag Hall of Fame by invoking the memories of the fallen on 9/11 to shill for Bush and do some preening of his own for his 2008 presidential campaign. Giuliani took advantage of the $154 million dollar orgy in Madison Square Garden to milk his starring role in 9/11 for all it was worth, in the meanwhile proclaiming that the Republican party had "removed the Taliban," making disingenuous (read: absurd) comparisons between the terror groups that had attacked the WTC and Hitler's march through Europe, and linking opposition to the war as "appeasement and compromise." Just in case you didn't get the point by then, he re-iterated the baseline message: "Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists."

Watching Giuliani whore himself out at the RNC for out-of-town guests in polo shirts mindlessly waving flip flops in the air, mindlessly caught up in the hysteria of their own delusions, was too much. Those cowards who were the furthest from the 9/11 attacks were the first to cry war. I had to run out of the coffee shop I was sitting in while watching the broadcast of the RNC before I threw something at the television. I wonder if Giuliani, the great New Yorker, still thanks God George Bush is president now that the Homeland Security Department continues to receive grades of Cs, Ds, and Fs on its annual report card, including an F grade for preparedness and response.

But then again, the great New Yorker Giuliani spent more time flying to and attending Yankees games in the months after 9/11 than he did working at Ground Zero, despite calling himself "one of the 9/11 cleanup workers" and boasting falsely that he was "at Ground Zero as often, if not more, than most of the workers."

Since then, mayor hero has increasingly come under attack from firefighters and first responders in NYC, some of whom blame the mayor for communications problems at Ground Zero, while others resent him for grandstanding about Ground Zero while concealing evidence of health problems now affecting 9/11 rescue workers.

"I found his comment to be disgracefully insulting," said Battalion Chief John J. McDonnell, president of the Uniformed Fire Officers Association in New York. "I personally saw him on the 11th, and I can't tell the next time I saw him" at the site after the attacks.

I think about the nights that I spent in my apartment pacing back and forth listening to the radio for updates after the attack, trying to sort things out. But I also remember the goodwill in the aftermath of the attacks — both from headlines in the foreign press and the genuine empathy I experienced in New York City firsthand — until it was squandered by the criminal and incompetent in the Bush administration and those like Rudy willing to pander to them.

As an expatriate living abroad, both statistically and through my own experiences, I can verify that the with-us-or-against-us attitudes and botched foreign policy by the Bush Administration, Giuliani, and the armchair quarterbacks clamoring for war from their suburban living rooms, have damaged, perhaps irreparably, America's reputation abroad. According to the Pew Global Attitudes Project Summary of Findings:

"A 47-nation survey finds global public opinion increasingly wary of the world's dominant nations and disapproving of their leaders. Anti-Americanism is extensive, as it has been for the past five years.... Global distrust of American leadership is reflected in increasing disapproval of the cornerstones of US foreign policy.... further more the United States is the nation blamed most often for hurting the world's environment, at a time of rising global concern about environmental issues."

People I've talked to in foreign countries — ranging from small business owners to academics to folks working in tea shops — simply don't give the US the benefit of the doubt anymore, at least from the candid assessments I've received from people in Malaysia, Vietnam, and Cambodia, Japan, and also here in Taiwan. In 2000 and 2001, I traveled throughout Asia, making stops in Japan, Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam. During my stay in those countries the first time around, even in Hanoi, people would be curious and excited when they learned I was American, they'd try to shake my hand, talk to me, and would ask me curiously about what America was like. Some students in a temple in Japan even asked for my autograph simply because I was American. People used to ask me about Michael Jordan, Bill Clinton, the NBA, was New York really the way it looked on television. People had their reservations but seemed to be willing to overlook them.

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