First off, let us say that everyone here at Corporate Mofo is OK, and that we hope that you and yours are, too.

We would also like to congratulate our fellow New Yorkers for pulling together at this horrible time. When we went to donate blood, we were turned away from the hospital—they had a surfeit of donors. It's just another proof that New Yorkers are the best people on Earth.

I was coming into work a bit late, because I'd stopped to vote in the mayoral primaries. The train I was on stopped for a few minutes outside Penn Station—no big deal, there's congestion all the time. Eventually, the subway pulled in, and I took the elevator up to my office. As soon as I reached the glass doors, I knew something was wrong. The atmosphere brought me back to when I was a kid, when we sat in school and watched the Challenger explode.

Everyone was gathered around the TV in the office foyer. I couldn't believe what I saw, so I ran to the south side of the building, where you can see all the way to the end of Manhattan on a clear day. And there it was: Like an evil cloud in the blue sky, thick, black smoke was billowing from the Twin Towers, the towers that had defined the skyline of my city for my entire life. We stood and watched, and all I could think about was the people trapped above those two blackened, smoking scars in the buildings. The words of the radio announcer who watched the Hindenberg crash ran through my mind: "The humanity. . . the humanity." The line may have been kitch once, but it hit home. It was like some horrible special effect—I knew it was happening, but I couldn't believe it.

I ran back to my computer, and began typing what I saw as fast as I could on the Fark.com message boards. Then, one of my coworkers came running in to tell us that the Towers had collapsed. I ran back to the window, and it was like the pictures of the Mt. St. Helens eruption. The towers were gone. People were crying. Others were staring in disbelief.

It was about then I realized that Penn Station, where I was, was itself a prime target. The office began emptying. I logged off Fark, took the elevator down (and I was glad when it hit the ground floor), and began walking uptown with a coworker, all the way home to 106 Street. His brother worked one block from the World Trade Center. From Times Square through the Upper West Side, he desperately tried to get through the clogged cell phone network to reach his family to see if anyone had heard anything, fearing the worst but not willing to give voice to his fears. By the time he left me in the 80s, he still didn't know. All through the city, the streets were filled with numb, shellshocked people wandering their way home. As we listened to Howard Stern call for vengeance on the radio of a parked truck, one woman told me her husband worked in the World Trade Center before wandering off in shock.

Everyone here will have lost someone they knew and loved.

You might think that, liberal anti-corporate bastards that we are, we must either be either eating our words and saluting the flag, or else applauding the destruction of a symbol of capitalist imperialism like a bunch of traitors.

Nothing of the sort. We hope that the U.S. government finds those responsible, and brings them to swift and sure justice. That's why we have governments: to protect us from the scary people, both within and without our society. And I hope that we rebuild the towers, so that New York City will once again have the world's tallest buildings—the biggest and the best of everything. Nothing keeps this city down.

Yet, as hurt as we are, now is the time for reason. We must keep our heads. Saying, "Let's nuke the towelheads" is about as productive as the thinking of the people who committed this crime. As Sun Tzu said, to defeat your enemy, you must know your enemy. If the culprits are indeed Islamic extremists, remember that the vast majority of the Muslim world does not agree with these people. It's OK to be angry and hurt. It's OK to desire vengeance. From the other point of view, it's even OK to recognize that the U.S. has done plenty of intervening in the Middle East to protect our precious petroleum interests. None of that is an excuse for an irrational act of vengeance. On anyone's part.

Do not attack American Muslims, in word, thought, or deed.

Do not think that simple exercise of our military force is the answer.

Donate blood.

We pray for peace, tolerance, and healing. And, when this is done and the culprits made examples of—for you can do little else with such people—we need to seriously rethink our place in the world.

Feel free to link to or quote from this story; just attribute the source.

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