I don’t know
An article about my friend Doug has appeared in today’s Richmond Times-Dispatch.
Douglas D. Ketcham’s last known phone call was to his parents in Florida.
He was in his Cantor Fitzgerald office on the 104th floor of One World Trade Center when the first plane hit several floors below him.
“He called his mother just after and said there had been a terrible explosion, and to tell them that he loved them,” said his friend, John Riley. “He called from underneath his desk.”
After Ketcham said those words, the connection went dead. No one has heard from him since, and he is missing.
Ketcham, 27, grew up in Midlothian. His parents, Dennis and Bobbie Ketcham, moved to Florida this year.
He graduated from Midlothian High School and the University of Virginia. He went to work as a bond trader for Cantor Fitzgerald after college.
“He loved New York,” Riley said. “He was very sharp, very bright. He loved to be around people.”
His circle of friends was huge. He visited his buddies in the Richmond area a couple of times a year, and they went to see him regularly in New York.
“When I put together an e-mail list of friends I think I counted 50 names,” Riley said. Each of them probably forwarded the bad news about Doug to many, many other friends.
“Doug was a friend to everybody and had a quick sense of humor,” Riley said yesterday. “He was a Christian and just stood for everything that was good. He was a gentleman.”
The article contains stories on many other people as well.
I’m not feeling as personally decimated as I was yesterday. I finally talked with my mom about what I was feeling, and she helped restore a small bit of rationality. After all, it’s not like I was in one of the buildings. It’s not like I was ever in any physical danger personally. Not that my feelings aren’t valid, but — well, my fear was starting to become amorphous and overwhelming. Talking with my mom helped it become more manageable. She told me I’m getting way too immersed in the coverage. She told me I need to see my friends again. I already knew that, but she’s right.
And so I’m going home today. Tonight I’m going to hang out with CanadaGirl, presumably in Manhattan. I need to be normal again.
And then on Monday I’m coming back here to my parents’ house for two days because it’s going to be Rosh Hashannah, the Jewish New Year. I don’t know quite what to expect from the holiday this year. But it will be nice for our congregation to come together and listen to the rabbi’s words. It’s something we’re going to need.
My dad finally got home at almost 2:00 this morning. His company chartered his colleagues a small Lear jet. They flew from San Francisco to Allentown, PA, and then took a van home from there. My dad and I had one of the biggest, longest, strongest hugs we’d ever had. He was glad to be home, obviously, and I feel better knowing that he’s back here.
From a superb article by Frank Rich in today’s New York Times:
This week’s nightmare, it’s now clear, has awakened us from a frivolous if not decadent decadelong dream, even as it dumps us into an uncertain future we had never bargained for.
The dream was simple — that we could have it all without having to pay any price, and that national suffering of almost any kind could be domesticated into an experience of virtual terror akin to a theme park ride…
The great shark scare of 2001 — already speeding to the dustbin of history, along with such other summer ephemera as Gary Condit, Robert Blake and Lizzie Grubman — was typical of an age in which we inflated troublesome but passing crises into catastrophes that provided the illusion of a national test of character, or some kind of moral equivalent of war, but in fact were for most of us merely invitations to indulge in cost-free hyperventilation…
Our desire for vicarious battle, the one commodity a stock market bubble couldn’t buy, also explains the fetishization of World War II.
War.
Despite the liberal cast of my demographics (my sexual orientation, my religion, my geographic location), I’ve never considered myself to be a far-left kind of guy. I’ve always thought of myself as merely a left-of-center moderate. I’m not particularly anti-war. I think we need to retaliate somehow. I don’t think war is bad if it will prevent future terror.
But I do think we need to be careful. Who knows if we’ll succeed in preventing future terror. We probably won’t, in fact. We won World War II only to have to fight the Cold War. The Law of Unintended Consequences. Humanity is both a remarkably wonderful species and a remarkably horrible species. Yin and yang. We’ll never be able to eliminate evil completely.
We have to be careful in whatever we decide to do. We have to separate war-as-catharsis from war-as-instrument. Despite the fact that a majority of the country wants it right now, I’m wondering if things will begin to change if the bodybags start coming home. On the other hand, after Tuesday’s destruction there are already at least 5,000 bodybags waiting to be filled with the innocent dead. Maybe things really have changed. Maybe we really are ready. I don’t know.
I just don’t know.
Before we go to war, we have to realize what we might be in for. I’m not against going to war in principle. It’s just that I just hope our “fetishization of World War II,” as Frank Rich put it, through movies and television and Tom Brokaw’s books, hasn’t inured us to what war really means.
We can’t just sit on our hands and spout touchy-feely I-love-humanity platitudes anymore. I’m sorry, but that’s not going to help. “War is not the answer,” you say? That’s a bit too trite and simple. This is the way the world works.
But before more lives are lost — the lives of even more friends and family members and possibly our own — we have to make sure we know the costs, and the consequences. And we have to make sure we know what the hell we’re doing, and what our goal is. We can’t do it just for catharsis.
Remember the Law of Unintended Consequences. It’s going to come back to haunt us, whatever we decide. Such is the universe.
I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.
None of us know.
Hey Guy:
We have been welcomed to the reality in which most people of this world live.
I’m tired of hearing words like “unbelievable” or “unfathomable”.
Suffering and destruction like this have been commonplace forever. It is what the record of history is about. It is what the larger and older cultures and religions and their texts are about. How do nations and peoples co-exist and cooperate? How do we handle war when they inevitably fail at it? People have been asking this question for thousands of years, and they wrote it all down.
Perhaps you will gain insight from reading your Great Books.
Keep writing and sharing of yourself. You are special.
Jonathan
Terrorists do what they do for a reason. They want to be heard, and acts of destruction and terror are the way to get them. And we, as a nation, can retalliate and retalliate and retalliate all we like, but unless we address the ISSUES, then more terrorists and extremists will just rise to take the places of those who have fallen. War is something for a different time. Humanity seems to be in a stage of adolscence. We’re too big for this “playground bullly” mentality, but afraid to grow up… we need to start acting like a world full of ADULTS!
i’m highlighting and quoting you aloud as i read. i absolutely agree. and it’s ironic b/c the generation that’s now leading us into war again is the same generation that protested going into vietnam. it’s people my age who’re going to die if reserves get called up.
You started this writing by speaking about your friend – and then the sadness hit as the reality of the situation grew. You know this person, you have been affected, personally. I pray you have peace at this time. God grant you strength.
David
If thats the way the universe works why bother talking about how we shouldnt do this and that.
I think you (and you is the United States of America) are already at war.
The attack was directed against the United States, not against the Western World in general, or ‘democracy’ or ‘freedom’.
I think Frank Rich is talking about what was happening inside the USA. Outside, your country, or better said: your governement, did perform some actions that can only be described as acts of war against other nations (Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan, Libia). Now fractions of extremists seem to have been seeking vengeance for those actions.
All this time I had the impression that you (you is the citizens of the USA) had no idea about what was going on outside the borders of your country, hence the shock you received from the (barbaric) attacks last tuesday.
I think most people at the other side of the Atlantic Ocean fear that the USA might drag us into their war. I think you and I share the same fear about a pending war, allthough the impact on our personal lives will be different.
I have visited one of the concentration camps of the second World War when I was in high school. That visit has turned me into a firm believer that war is never an answer to any kind of problem. War will always demand casualties of innocent people who are at the wrong spot, at the wrong time, often with the wrong background.
The war in the Balkan countries have shown us recently what war means to a people, what power-seeking idiots can achieve if they know what buttons to push.
The ‘brains’ behind the attack of last tuesday hope that a war-like response will be given by the USA government, because it will give them a basis to fortify their power over their people.
I don’t know either what the appropiate response will be. I am just afraid that an appropriate answer does not exist.
Jeff,
Since this past second anniversary of the tragedy at WTC, I have found myself reading as much as I can find, preferably first-hand stories, of that horrendous day in downtown Manhattan… This is how I came across your site. First allow me to say that I have a deep and abiding emotional and aesthetic connection to Manhattan, even though I am in Florida. My closest friend lives at 5th Av and 9th St, just down the sidewalk from the 9th St PATH station, and I have, since 87, visited him almost 30 times. Each time, my stay was at least a week and most times 2 weeks, giving me the chance to say that I have “lived” in Manhattan for about 1 year. As such, I have many many friends and aquaintences there and have come, over time, to love NYC fervently, and indeed, consider it to be my second home. Unfortunately, I have not been back since the election ( crapshoot…? ) of November,2000. I labor under a rather strange duality, inthat I have both an inescapable yearning to go back, on its own merit, yet also to see for myself the remnant of such gargantuan hate… and at the same time, *not wanting* to see the gravesite of so many thousands and also of those once-towering titans of the NYC landscape I had seen so many times. There is ( or was ) an electrifying view of the skyline from a small engineering college on the Hudson in Hoboken, and from my first visit, I had returned many times ( having to literally sneak onto the campus each time, which seemed to only enhance the experience… the little boy in us really does seem not to die easily ) to take in that breathtaking sight. I am fearful that looking scross the river and not seeing those towers will be more than I can bear… having said that, I am planning to be back again this coming spring and let the “chips fall where they may”… The thing that haunts me most about what happened there is that I have no way to contact the majority of my friends and people I have come to know on a less formal basis there, having never gotten their last names or addresses. It bothers me greatly to know that at least one, if not more, of these people with whom I have shared time, could have been in those buildings that morning… If so, I would never know and so, for myself, there has never been a sense of closure. I am not sure why I am even writing this note, but in some strange way, perhaps it helps to communicate this very minor part of a much larger collective, to you… again, not really even knowing why… on September 11, 2001, I could feel New York screaming in pain, fear and outrage, and it was frustrating beyond description not to have been there to do, in my own small way, anything I could do to ease the suffering and just be part of making things, somehow, better again… I have mixed feelings about going back next spring, but go I shall… I need to be there, if only for a while…
Michael
Jeff,
Since this past second anniversary of the tragedy at WTC, I have found myself reading as much as I can find, preferably first-hand stories, of that horrendous day in downtown Manhattan… This is how I came across your site. First allow me to say that I have a deep and abiding emotional and aesthetic connection to Manhattan, even though I am in Florida. My closest friend lives at 5th Av and 9th St, just down the sidewalk from the 9th St PATH station, and I have, since 87, visited him almost 30 times. Each time, my stay was at least a week and most times 2 weeks, giving me the chance to say that I have “lived” in Manhattan for about 1 year. As such, I have many many friends and aquaintences there and have come, over time, to love NYC fervently, and indeed, consider it to be my second home. Unfortunately, I have not been back since the election ( crapshoot…? ) of November,2000. I labor under a rather strange duality, inthat I have both an inescapable yearning to go back, on its own merit, yet also to see for myself the remnant of such gargantuan hate… and at the same time, *not wanting* to see the gravesite of so many thousands and also of those once-towering titans of the NYC landscape I had seen so many times. There is ( or was ) an electrifying view of the skyline from a small engineering college on the Hudson in Hoboken, and from my first visit, I had returned many times ( having to literally sneak onto the campus each time, which seemed to only enhance the experience… the little boy in us really does seem not to die easily ) to take in that breathtaking sight. I am fearful that looking scross the river and not seeing those towers will be more than I can bear… having said that, I am planning to be back again this coming spring and let the “chips fall where they may”… The thing that haunts me most about what happened there is that I have no way to contact the majority of my friends and people I have come to know on a less formal basis there, having never gotten their last names or addresses. It bothers me greatly to know that at least one, if not more, of these people with whom I have shared time, could have been in those buildings that morning… If so, I would never know and so, for myself, there has never been a sense of closure. I am not sure why I am even writing this note, but in some strange way, perhaps it helps to communicate this very minor part of a much larger collective, to you… again, not really even knowing why… on September 11, 2001, I could feel New York screaming in pain, fear and outrage, and it was frustrating beyond description not to have been there to do, in my own small way, anything I could do to ease the suffering and just be part of making things, somehow, better again… I have mixed feelings about going back next spring, but go I shall… I need to be there, if only for a while…
Michael