Later this is the view....This past August, Kami and I went to New York city for a weeklong summer vacation. We went to Broadway musicals, went to Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Ellis Island, The Statue of Liberty, spent time wandering Times Square, Greenwich Village, Battery Park, and lots of the "tourist" spots. New York is an amazing place to be experienced. So much history takes place there, so much America is New York City. So it only seemed right that we went one afternoon down to Ground Zero. And everything changed...again.
I had been to the World Trade Center as a kid and somewhere have a photo of myself on top of one of the towers. Kami and I shuffled along with the huge evening crowds heading home from work as we made our way to the viewing "platform" that was along the south side. Walking up, they had a memorial plaque above the steel fence honoring the heroes and those who lost their lives in the September 11th, 2001 attacks. Thousands of names, each one a life gone forever. Men, women, children. Dead. Families destroyed and lives ruined. It all came rushing back; the morning news I had on while getting ready for work when they cut to a live feed of the first tower on fire...calling my family in California because my brother and aunt both fly for American Airlines, then watching plane number two hit the other tower. And life as we knew it changed eternally that morning. We knew things would never be the same. Life would change in ways that were at one time unimaginable. I stood overlooking ground zero seven years later. Gazing firsthand the giant hole, the scar, and knew the wound in myself hadn't healed yet, because as the tears came and I gripped the fence all I could feel was anger. Anger for such a senseless, terrifying, inexcusable despicable act of malice, terror and cowardliness. And then sadness. Sadness that I thought was forgotten and buried. Sadness that should have been hope. But seeing where it all happened...in person...brought it all back to life. What I saw on TV was now in front of me. It felt real in a way that petrified me. The tears kept coming. I stood there, my hands clenched hard on the metal grate, trembling with sorrow, fear, anger and then I felt Kami putting her arm around me . I turned and just wanted to collapse. She pulled me in and wrapped her arms around me, our faces buried in each other's neck. People passed by, some stopped, some turned and closed their eyes, others stared into the sky as if they could see what once stood towering above us. Maybe they could see it. All I could see was a reminder of where we've been, and what happened to America in the weeks and months following that awful morning.
Kami and I stood there for a short while unsure of what exactly we wanted or needed to take away from this experience. Frankly I wanted to run away and never come back. New Yorkers are a tough crowd to stick around after getting a shot in the heart like that. I can look back now and understand that everyone was affected by 9/11 in different ways.Engine Co. 10 looks over ground zero. There's not a single day they don't get reminded of the lives that were taken. I walked by after leaving the viewing platform and had a feeling of hope and optimism seeing the firefighters chatting and going about their day. While I've no doubt they never have a "normal" day comparatively speaking, it gave me a sense that for now things were going to okay. We got through this attack as a country, as families and friends. We stood together for a brief and glorious time united as a nation...as one.
Kami teaches high school history and her freshman students this fall are too young to really remember much at all. When asked, most of her kids remember some images of the twin towers from the TV, or that their cartoons were interrupted. Most don't really get what happened. A new generation of kids are coming of age in world where fear is the norm. In a world where they've always had Homeland Security and orange-colored terror alerts. These kids will grow up never knowing what it was like to not have that fear. Fear that this could happen again. On the other hand, their country has been at war for more than half of their lifetime. War. For half of your life. Why aren't you kids angry yet? Maybe you see things differently than I do? Maybe.
So I hope your teachers teach you well. And teach you that; yes, in fact this amazing place called America stood up one time to face the future as a unified whole. We really did have a time when we weren't conservatives or liberals, Republicans or Democrats. We were citizens of the United States of America, and that meant something larger than we could ever possibly imagine. It didn't matter where you went, people had changed. People weren't strangers; instead they were someone you only hadn't met yet. We were collectively changed by the attacks of September 11th. The sadness didn't matter, the anger was tempered and we picked ourselves back up. I we remember what that felt like. I hope we can explain it to those that were too young to feel it. While we honor those that lost their lives that day, let's honor them by not forgetting that we, America, and the rest of the world can put our differences aside and instead embrace the singular truth. We're humans first and foremost; citizens of our only planet and caretakers of our only brethren. To see us any other way is to ultimately fail ourselves.
I made this video in the years following 9/11 for a course in college, however, this is the unfinished rough draft, as the final copy is too large to upload.
