Tragedy+10: The attempt to rationalize

Editor’s note: Jeff Collins, an economist based in Northwest Arkansas, was director of the Walton College Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Arkansas, on Sept. 11, 2001. He was at the World Trade Center when the planes hit the towers.

essay by Jeff Collins

Every once in a while it comes out that I was in New York City at the time of the 9/11 attacks. Not just there, but there … at ground zero. Inevitably there is immediate skepticism and then the question, “What did you do?”

I have a well-rehearsed response to that question, and I have told the story at least a couple dozen times in the 10 years since the tragedy. However, when I was asked to write about that day for The City Wire, the thought of rehashing my standard response seemed a hollow exercise.

What I want to write, and what is ultimately more important, is the perspective I have gained based on the events of that day given 10 years have passed.

When I got back to Arkansas, Sept. 13, I went back to my routine as quickly as I could; work, family, friends. To deal with what everyone imagined I was feeling I also went to a therapist. Ostensibly, I went to talk through my emotions and deal with the trauma, but mostly I went because I thought that it was what I should do. What I didn’t do then, and perhaps have never completely done, is ask how the experience has changed me.

That it changed me is undeniable. Moreover, it continues to affect my understanding of who I am and how the world works.

My initial reaction to the tragedy was that nothing really mattered. What I saw running from the Marriott World Trade Center was so beyond anything I could imagine there was no compartment to put the experience into. Most importantly, that all of the pain and horror could be caused by a group of people who had never met their victims, whose relationship to them was so conceptual, was beyond my ability to rationalize.

It took years to move beyond the perception that there was no meaning to anything, that the world was pure randomness. If there was a plan, then the 9/11 events had a place in the plan and that just couldn’t be possible. No planner is that cruel.

“Why?” remains my central question in the decade since I ran from the burning towers.

I wish I had a good answer. I just can’t imagine a level of hate that would have allowed the hijackers to methodically plan and execute the attacks over so long a period of time. Surely at some point one of them must have questioned and thought about stopping the plan they had set in motion.

What 9/11 has given me is the profound sense that every action is a choice. I now more than ever recognize that choices are conscious acts. The central issue is what is motivating that choice?

I have to believe that there is a plan. I think the plan is to learn to make choices consciously. I also think the plan is to learn to make choices motivated by love rather than hate. Those choices made based on love are seldom if ever wrong, while those based on fears are seldom right.

Frankly, I can live with the outcomes of a world where actions are motivated by love, whatever the outcomes may be.