How a Disappointing Book Made Me Reflect on 9/11

Seek Immediate Shelter by Vincent Yu has a simple premise. People in a community receive an emergency alert on their cell phones to seek immediate shelter due to an incoming missile, and find out about 15 minutes later that it was a false alarm. I thought it would be a community reacting together to address the following question: What would you do with the last few minutes if your death was imminent, and would you be happy or regret that decision when you find out that impending doom wasn’t coming? If that was what you were looking for, then I am sorry to disappoint. Instead of a book where a group of people reacts to annihilation, we get a collection of short stories where the majority of them have the emergency alert as a footnote at the end of the story. 

There were only two stories that I found interesting. One story was about a man who received the emergency alert and wanted to flee instead of sheltering in place. He got anxious as he waited for his wife and baby to hurry up. He heard a sudden boom, which caused him to panic and try to drive off without his family in the car. He didn’t get that far since he didn’t wait for the garage door to fully open, and he ended up crashing the car. The man spent the rest of the story trying to play down what he did, and he doesn’t understand why his wife is upset with him for fleeing without them during a crisis. Then there was a story of a husband and wife who received the emergency alert. The scare caused the husband to have a heart attack and die, leaving the wife alone in mourning. However, a couple of weeks later, the husband’s death revealed things that made the wife realize that she didn’t really know him at all. 

The overall thing that I got from the collection of stories (especially the man who fled instead of protecting his family) is that as much as we like to think we would know what we would do in an emergency, we never know what we would truly do until we are in the moment. Seek Immediate Shelter is an interesting thought experiment that loses the theme for the majority of the book. However, after reading, I did have the following question: Are certain aspects of the book relevant now? Thinking about it for a while, I believe the book has an important point, especially with today being the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. 

The thing I remembered most was the stories shared by witnesses and survivors in the coming weeks after the attacks. When the tower hit, people didn’t know what to do. Some fled downstairs to escape. Some jumped from high up to escape the flames. There was a bunch of miscommunication about how to get people to safety, with people going against orders. The passengers from one of the planes fought off terrorists long enough to prevent the plane from hitting the target, and sacrificed their lives in the process. Air travel was forever changed, with many restrictions and security measures added to airports. Firefighters who helped directly after the attack were affected by the fumes and chemicals produced that day. 

It was pure chaos. But that is the thing with a tragedy of this magnitude. There was no way to prepare for it. No one at that point had ever faced what had happened before or even thought it was a possibility. That is why, while I am not particularly fond of Seek Immediate Shelter, I do appreciate it for what it is: a reminder that while there may be some safety procedures to follow, you never know how you will react to a situation until it happens. The effects of the tragedy are sometimes long-lasting and make permanent changes in your life and society in general. We can only hope that when disaster does come, we can make the best decision with what we have before us.