A Short Reflection Ten Years On

It is about to be at end, this decade anniversary of the worst attack on the United States in its history. It is nearly midnight in New York as I begin writing, where it all happened, where 3,000 people were eradicated by two planes deliberately smashed into the World Trade Center and nearly 9 p.m. here in Los Angeles where I write.

I was almost inclined to write nothing in this forum. Has not everything been said?
Indeed, probably there is nothing useful to add, certainly nothing novel. But I guess I want to record for my personal posterity that I was one of those many who never forgot. It is not likely worth much, but it is my small offering.

I was waking far earlier than is my wont that morning. I turned on the radio. I think both towers had been struck. I rolled over in my bed to turn up the sound. There could be no imagining this.  As a New Yorker, I knew those buildings well. I worked mere blocks away as a college student, on John Street. I recall the day Phillipe Petit walked between them. When I was a college student and post college student, those buildings were still new and talked about as a new image of New York. I only went inside a couple of times over the years. I have to admit I never liked the height (110 stories), just like I am not much fond of flying.  I did have one occasion to go to Windows on the World on the very top and I recall the massive high speed elevator shaking all the way up to a wind chorus. It was an overcast day so I never got the view of the city and the harbor, but it did feel that I was truly in the clouds, not unlike Olympus itself. I was happy to be on the ground floor again at the end of the festivities and remember that I was not inclined to a another visit to the top. I also recall that I wondered how someone could get out of the building quickly in the case of fire. I knew they could not.

Two planes? That cannot have been an accident. Quickly terrorism became our primary (it had been out there but not like this before) watchword. And then the North Tower came down. How could a building of that height come down at all let alone that quickly? The people waving white handkerchiefs out the floors above the inferno--some of them jumped to a certain death and the majority were pulverized into the white and gray ash that were the remains of the entire structure. People just like us.  People just like me. People who minutes before were considering a break from their desks. People who had been at the beach a day or two before for a last bit of summer. People who had plans. People who had a right to their lives.

I did not lose any family or friends in that destructive evil act by people for whom we simply should not make any excuse (although for the last ten years that is what we have done as a society in a political correct stupor) but I know that the stories of lives cut off unnecessarily have been repeated this weekend among those families that did.  Good thing. We want to circumvent the growth of a generation that finds this horrific event a boring piece of history that has no significance for them. It might be, with Grace, that generation that brings us back to the founding values of our socieity. I defer to Dennis Prager on what these three are, E Pluribus Unum, In God we Trust and Liberty. By refusing to embrace our values and to promote them, even to the point of being forbidden to do so, we continue to cooperate in the destruction of the American Experiment.

There is nothing that can justify the vile acts on September 11, 2001. It remains the acts we must condemn, regardless of who perpetrated them. And then, there are the acts of those who tried to save others, fireman, police, the clergyman, Fr. Michael Judge who was the first known death of the attack and many unknown heroes. Their acts of goodness give us hope that we can retrieve our natrional soul..

In February 2002, only five months after the attack I went with a friend back to my hometown. We visited the site. By then it was mostly clear of the building and human dust aftermath. But it was still very fresh. You had to walk on wooden planks to get around. There were construction vans gathered in spaces that used to be where the buildings stood. A couple of initial memorials, like the workers on a beam, reminding us that something would rise there again, were up.

On this piece of wood:  As we walked through the Valley of Death We Feared no evil.

There were the makeshift memorials, sheets on which you could write your message, and pleas about loved ones still lingering. They are not the best pictures, but they are ones reflecting my visit which I still remember as poignant.

Pray for all those who died, and those first responders who have suffered physically and psychologically, since. Pray that our nation will remember its roots, its Creator centered roots.