The Fourth Plane
In the fall when I was seventeen, I lived alone in a basement apartment. The apartment sat within a mile of the University of Maryland.
This wasn't a good year for me at UMD. It was a fast-food-working year. It was full of relationships failing, college courses flunking, over-drinking, and a bit of learning. But the learning wasn't scholarly. For distraction from my various failures, I had access to a television and a radio. One afternoon, I turned on the radio while I was cleaning.
"... the lighter side of the news."
Radio news was important. I couldn't afford the newspaper. So when the story resumed, I turned to make my bed, so I could stay close.
"When a fire broke out at an asylum in Massachusetts, the staff fled. They left the residents locked in their rooms with no means to escape the fire." The narrator paused long enough for me to wonder why this was light news. "Fortunately, a set of patients had prepared for this eventuality.
"These patients escaped their locked hallway. They went to the safe where the master keys were kept. They knew the combination. And when they opened it, keys in hand, they started freeing other patients. Because these patients, now the ones in charge, had planned well."
Again, the announcer paused for effect. He was pretty good at it.
"The patients not only freed the ones who were trapped in their rooms, they lined them up. They marched everyone out of the building and lined them up again on the front lawn. Who were these patients?"
In the background of the radio studio, I could hear the rustle of a piece of paper.
"They were the paranoids. The patients diagnosed with paranoia were the ones who were prepared."
After I finished making my bed, I got out the vacuum and started on the recreation room. I chuckled about the news until I sighed about my looming course homework.
By the end of the week, I found myself still thinking about the radio article. I started to wonder why I found the story reassuring. Maybe it was because it reaffirmed my general approach.
I had a certain amount of wariness, usually, and it likely came from the decade or more that my father crept up behind me while I was distracted. He always slapped me on the back of the head. Those years of getting hit tended to make me slightly aware, even when I was otherwise lost in my reading. I would keep a sense of the noises around me, the scratch of pencil against paper, the click of the screen door latch, the squeak of a floorboard. Often, I would react too late and get hit. But I had built up a level of awareness, however inconsistent it might be.
One of my younger brothers would launch sneak attacks, now and then. It was another reason to stay wary, especially out in the yard. In the road, of course, cars would speed through. Four times, they ran over our pets. I retained some awareness there, too, although the road would vibrate under my feet. Even if I hadn't been paying attention before, I could feel a car coming.
Awareness was useful in the woods, where I could be silent enough, sometimes, to see animals. It was useful in public school, where the football players were not able to knock my books out of my hands and I was able to tease them into giving up.
Years later, in the fall of 2001, I wondered if my background level of paranoia was normal. I stayed home from work to tend to my sick kids on September 11. I turned on the news. When I returned to the room with diaper wipes, a television announcer told me that a plane had just hit the World Trade Center.
My response was, "Again?"
No one had driven a plane into the World Trade Center before, of course, but the place had been bombed. And bombed again. And there was another bombing attempt. And again. I had figured someone would try a passenger jet just because planes had always seemed so easy to weaponize if you could take over the cockpit. A series of hijacking incidents had, in the past generation, indicated it wasn't hard to take over.
A week later, I visited my friends Richard and Andrea. Richard had seen and felt the attack on the Pentagon that day. He and everyone around him had known the explosion meant they were in an emergency situation. But he hadn't been able to call Andrea with the airwaves clogged. His phone had turned into a useless block of metal that day. His standard modes of transportation had ground to a halt. The subway had closed down and turned away passengers. Cars had flooded the streets and halted, blocked by one another. Taxis couldn't get anywhere. Richard had to hike out from the center of the city to get home.
"What do you mean, you expected the attacks?" Richard asked me, rather reasonably, when I said I felt they were years late.
"It's just that we've been bombed before. And at the World Trade Center before. And the Pentagon is a military target."
"You weren't surprised at all?"
"Well, yes," I replied after a moment of consideration. "I was surprised the buildings fell."
That calmed Richard for a moment. He nodded.
"Everyone was surprised by that part," he agreed.
"But they used passenger jets," said Andrea. "That was new."
"Not ... really." I flashed back to all the hijackings and mis-uses of planes. Andrea was right, strictly speaking. No one had quite done this. But I was right, too, if only I could articulate the thoughts I hadn't spoken. "I've been expecting planes to get used in attacks."
"Why?" asked Richard.
It was a hard part to describe. The pattern of attacks seemed readily evident. What about them seemed less obvious to my friends? They seemed to be constantly expressing their shock about the planes in New York, the jet in DC, and the fourth one crashing over Pennsylvania. And why did so many people forget about the heroism of the passengers in the fourth plane?
The fourth flight, I realized, is where I automatically put myself. Even on September 11, when the news had broken late that fighter jets were scrambling toward the Maryland-Pennsylvania border, I had thought of being a passenger caught up in the battle.
Our country had been attacked many times. And we had responded with violence. And we had bombed towns. And we had supported one side or other in wars. We had done a lot of things other countries would say deserved revenge. How could people not know, in the face of so many attempts to murder us, that people wanted to murder us? It seemed incredible.
Part of our national awareness problem was that so many people lived lives of peace. War makers, then and now, are a minority. Another difficulty is the distance. It’s easy to forget about remote horrors.
But I think the main difference is a variation in our personal senses of revenge. Most people seem to give up on it after a while. They have problems believing that someone whose brother was killed by an American missile might be committed to acts of vengeance a decade later.
I remember burning with the desire for vengeance as a child. Maybe mostly as a child, although sometimes as a teen. And I had exacted it, too. I had waited for years, sometimes, to take revenge. My brothers plotted for years, too. I thought plotting for years was normal. Mostly, I planned for my defense. But I fought for what I perceived as justice. I imagined committing murders, dying in righteous battles, and more.
"If I thought Americans killed my friends, I'd hate Americans, too." I considered the problem for a moment longer. "Well, maybe."
I didn't know if that was actually true. Even when I had wanted vengeance as a child, I had wanted it due to specific incidents with specific perpetrators involved. I knew who deserved cruel, cruel justice. I hadn't often been in a situation where I didn't know the perpetrator and, in those few times I didn't, I had tried to find out rather than committing random violence.
That's why, mentally, I was on the fourth plane. I genuinely expected attacks and it wasn’t that I thought I could do anything useful about them. Sometimes in my best mental scenarios I would be caught at a disadvantage and die. But in all my plans, really, I expected to die trying. I would always attempt some sort of defense, even if the situation was hopeless.
Between my watchfulness and my sense of how people seek revenge, I found that I had been waiting for the World Trade Center attacks for years. It made me feel like a paranoid in contrast to my friends. But in my defense, the expectation was right.
People want justice. They will plot for years to achieve it. Then they will commit injustice because they lack the social power, expertise, and sense of dispassion to achieve real justice. Recognizing this seems cynical. Maybe it even seems paranoid. But it's true.
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