Common Sense

I just want to write one last thing about 9/11 and then we can get back to writing about pornstars and whatnot.

There are two stories from that day that seem so eerily fortuitous that one has to wonder at the existence of some higher being pulling the strings. But both these stories also involve a choice being made and the excercise of free will leading to the outcome that is best for everyone.

In the South Tower on the 81st Floor, Stanley Praimnath witnessed Flight 175 coming towards his building and his floor was one that was virtually destroyed by the impact. In his recounting of the impact, he says he was on the phone when he saw the plane coming from the direction of the Statue of Liberty. When he realized it was going to hit, he said “It’s in your hands Lord,” and dove under his desk. Almost everyone on his floor was killed but he survived, trapped by the rubble of collapsed office walls.

Shortly thereafter, Brian Clarke and his co-workers were passing the 81st Floor in Stairway A, the only stairway not destroyed that allowed those above the impact zone to evacuate. A large woman was coming up the stairs and she reported to the group that there was smoke and fire below and she wouldn’t let anyone pass her and go down. She insisted that they go up to get away from the fire. Just then, Brian heard someone screaming for help inside the 81st Floor. While he and a friend went to look for this person, everyone else in their group started making their way up the stairs. None of them survived the collapse.

Brian’s friend was soon overcome by smoke and left to go back up the stairway with the rest of the group. Brian, meanwhile, was walking throuhgh what seemed to him a miraculous bubble of fresh air until he saw a hand through a pile of rubble. It was Stanley Praimnath’s hand and he was trapped on the other side. Brian got him to up and over that pile and they both evacuated down the stairs making out of the tower not long before its collapse.

If Brian had not gone to help this voice, he may well have died with his co-workers when the South Tower fell. And Stanley surely would have remained trapped and also died.

In the North Tower, on the 27th Floor, the Ladder 6 firefighter crew headed by Capt. Jay Jonas was resting and drinking water before taking another 10 flights of stairs. That’s when they heard what sounded like a violent explosion above them and it was getting nearer. It seemed as though they were in an earthquake as the lights went out and the noise got closer and closer. Then it was below them and soon, it was gone.

After Jonas checked the north side, one of his fellow captains came back from the south side to tell him that the South Tower had just collapsed. Unable to contact his command post for orders, Capt. Jonas made the snap decision to evacuate his men and get out of the tower before it too fell.

Racing down as fast as possible through Stairway B, they encountered a bookkeeper named Josephine from the 74th Floor. She had made it that far but could no longer walk on her own. One of the firefighters turned to Capt. Jonas to ask what they should do with her. With every fiber of his being telling him that they should get out as fast as possible and that there was no time to waste, Capt. Jonas told his men to stop and help this woman. And he instructed them that they all stay together in one group.

They made it as far as the 5th Floor landing before Josephine collapsed unable to walk any further. Capt. Jonas went searching for a chair or something that would make it easier to carry her the rest of the way. In one of the world’s largest office buildings, Jonas found a maintenance floor with no office chairs of any kind. That’s when the shaking and the thunderous noise started again.

Rushing back to his men in the stairwell, Capt. Jonas made it just in time before the 100 floors above them arrived with a huge amount of force on top of them. Jonas waited for that one big piece of concrete to fall on him and end it. And he waited. And he waited. It never came.

Soon he realized that the rumbling had stopped and that the stairway was more or less intact around him and his crew. Even their “special guest” Josephine was unharmed. And after calling for help and getting an answer on his radio, one of his men discovered that just above them was an opening to the outside with no rubble on top of them.

The men of Ladder Company 6 were safe. By the time the collapse reached the 5th Floor, there were several floors of debris within the footprint of the tower that kept them from being crushed. If they had waited any longer for orders to evacuate before leaving, they would have been higher than the 5th Floor and no one above the 5th Floor survived. If they had not stopped and slowed their own descent by helping Josephine, they would have been lower than the 4th Floor where the debris had settled and the force of the collapse wasn’t cushioned. If they had been any higher or any lower in that stairwell, they wouldn’t have lived.

These people were given choices and they made the right ones, even though it seemed at the time that those choices could be the death of them. By making the right choice, they survived when so many others didn’t. That’s not proof in the existence of God, not by a longshot. But if I were to call these events something, the word miracle comes to mind. It is miraculous that anyone could survive inside a collapsed skyscraper or right at the site of impact in the South Tower.

Somehow, it is comforting to think there is a God and that those who made the right decisions were given miraculous survival stories. It’s comforting because other people, like Rick Rescorla and John O’Neill, who stayed behind to make sure everyone that could be rescued and evacuated was. Surely, if there is a God and he granted life to those who made the right decisions, then surely those who did not live but made the right decisions at the time were granted something even better. Perhaps they were granted everlasting life.