And then, he says, the F-15s flew over Portland, either late that morning or early in the afternoon. James worked in a hair salon at the time. He left work after two hours or so, not just because people kept calling in to cancel their appointments but because he found himself unable to concentrate. “My reaction was a monumental wave of sadness,” he says. He believed that one of his cousins worked at the World Trade Center, but even after he found out that his cousin was employed elsewhere by that time, the sadness persisted. “There was this hopelessness that nothing could be done, this realization that everything had changed,” he says. “It was like seeing the curtain being ripped down and knowing that the illusion we’d had that we were somehow safe from the shit you see on television was no longer possible.”
James says he was fairly knowledgeable about the Middle East at the time, and it was that knowledge that informed his reaction to the events of that morning. “I did wonder how it was possible that we’d gotten that far without something like that happening,” he says. “And I thought, oh shit, this country is going to become like Palestine.”
