I remember, like millions of others, the bright, warm, September morning - the ordinariness of it all banal by now. And the horror that followed those morning routines is recalled so many different ways.
I was not there. I was miles away, ensconced in the old house in Connecticut where we were going to make our home for the next few years, or so we thought. Like millions of others, I watched on television, frightened, awestruck and not quite believing what I was seeing. A trip into the city just one week later brought me in touch with the loss, the grief and to my mind hopefulness and hopelessness expressed in those “missing” posters around Union Square, Penn Station and Grand Central.
So what do I feel on this 8th anniversary? Sorrow – aching sorrow. There is grief for all the lives lost and anger over the way this country’s leaders led us into wars and terror on a new scale. But overwhelming sorrow… for what cannot be returned, for what was lost in the rubble, for the greed and belligerence that the event engendered.
After the attacks, I believed that this was an opportunity for us (citizens of the United States) to rise to our best selves. United in grief, we would seek justice but not vengeance. We would model a righteous peacefulness and we would rebuild in new ways. Naive hopes, perhaps, but I believe it still, even though I am more convinced every day that humanity may not reach this state in my lifetime. I must believe it is possible.
For me, these thoughts are almost a daily presence. Reports on the “progress” of the wars in Afghanistant and Iraq, the economy warped and ravaged by those wars, the rebuilding of “ground zero and the value of real estate in Manhattan… every day, opportunities to reflect on how the attacks of September 11th invade and affect our lives in one way or another. I don’t brood over the memories, but I sense the interconnections, the reverberations in all that happens now..
So let me say this: just as I hoped for and advocated a peaceful response to those attacks, from the beginning I believed that no new towers should be built on that site. There is plenty of commercial real estate available in New York City.
Might not the site already be reopened if they had simply built some kind of memorial museum-like building in a park-like setting that focused on two still, reflecting pools marking the “footprint” of each of the World Trade Center towers. Simple, peaceful, full of memory and maybe even hope… why do we have to make a buck on this extreme event? Each year people are moved by the “absence” memorial created by the twin beams of light that reach into the night sky on lower Manhattan.
My heart still breaks. But my heart must still have hope.
