Digitalization has saved acres of trees from being used to record the torrent of words that continue to be written about the terrorist attacks on America on September 11, 2001; the destruction of the World Trade Towers in New York, the damage to the Pentagon and the fiery end of American Airlines Flight 93 in a rural field in western Pennsylvania, where the actions of courageous passengers prevented even more damage and loss of life. These events, and their aftermath, have been recorded, examined, and analyzed to a fare-thee-well with volumes of comments by some of the greatest and not so great minds of our time. But as we mark the sixth anniversary of this terrible affair, the memories, while melded together by the effects of time, are as vivid and clear as they were six years ago and beg to be re-examined.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was sitting in an industry conference at a Mid-town Manhattan hotel when one of the organizers came to the podium in the middle of a presentation to announce that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. With additional information lacking, it was first assumed that a terrible accident had taken place, but the stark truth soon became apparent. With the conference hastily adjourned, I found myself in the hotel bar, which doubled as a morning breakfast room. There, among a group of strangers, we learned of the second plane and watched the first tower fall as we tried to get our minds to comprehend the magnitude of the loss of life we were witnessing in real time on the hotel’s TV. Leaving the hotel, I cut across the Park and headed downtown on Sixth Ave to my office at fiftieth, swimming against the tide of the endless swarm of people moving north on Sixth. The vista over their heads was the long view downtown where huge clouds of black smoke were billowing into the impossibly clear blue sky three miles to the south. Shortly we would begin to see people with their clothes covered with soot and cinders as the first of the Wall Streeters began to arrive in Midtown. More information seeped out. There had also been an attack at the Pentagon and it was reported that additional commercial airliners were not responding. Jet fighters could be seen flying up the East River. Long portions of the day were a blur of trying to assimilate the incremental information which, over time, began to coalesce into a stark reality
When they finally got the trains running out of Grand Central that afternoon, I arrived home and we began to put a more personal face on the casualties. Among the missing was our friend’s daughter, recently married, and newly pregnant with her first child. She worked at Cantor Fitzgerald and along with hundreds of her co-workers was missing We began to understand the reality of just what “missing’ meant in the context of the mountain of smoking remains at what came to be called ground zero and began to taste the bitter futility of dashed hope. In neighborhoods all over greater New York, the tragedy struck painfully close to home.
And long after these events dropped from prominence in the national news, the wreckage at ground zero continued to smolder as crews continued to search for victims and knots of firefighters in their dress uniforms made their way to St. Patrick’s Cathedral for still another heartbreaking farewell to a comrade.
We would eventually learn a great deal about the perpetrators of this horrific crime, their names and faces becoming all too familiar. And we learned how easily they had come to America, taking advantage of our free society, to scheme and plot, even to obtain aeronautical training so as to be able to execute on their vicious plans Our country’s vaunted intelligence agencies, perhaps still organized to fight the old cold war, missed the clues and the chance at prevention but I don’t think many of us had any idea of the presence of those among us with such pure evil in their hearts. We still ask ourselves what kind of people would fly plane loads of passengers into buildings? And the big question remains: why? What did they hope to gain? What exactly was the payoff they were seeking? We learned about widespread desire for martyrdom and the gibberish of its rewards, but the basic question still remains. Why?
They came to the United States, and used covert means to achieve nothing less than a vicious military attack against our civilian population. To try and explain these actions with a rationale of religious, and/or political goals obscures the essential evil of their nature. History has shown that appeasement of such factions has only strengthened their determination. The threat posed by such factions must be met with all the resources of this great country including military reprisals, however unpopular. Those committed to the politicization of our very survival as a nation, who call for passivity in favor of some vague prescriptive for a heavier reliance on reasoning and diplomacy are either implausibly naive or willing to allow the lust for political power to trump even the defense of our most basic values. They must be reminded that it is the aggressive preservation of our way of life that allows them to hold their contrary views, no matter how inappropriate they might be.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was sitting in an industry conference at a Mid-town Manhattan hotel when one of the organizers came to the podium in the middle of a presentation to announce that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. With additional information lacking, it was first assumed that a terrible accident had taken place, but the stark truth soon became apparent. With the conference hastily adjourned, I found myself in the hotel bar, which doubled as a morning breakfast room. There, among a group of strangers, we learned of the second plane and watched the first tower fall as we tried to get our minds to comprehend the magnitude of the loss of life we were witnessing in real time on the hotel’s TV. Leaving the hotel, I cut across the Park and headed downtown on Sixth Ave to my office at fiftieth, swimming against the tide of the endless swarm of people moving north on Sixth. The vista over their heads was the long view downtown where huge clouds of black smoke were billowing into the impossibly clear blue sky three miles to the south. Shortly we would begin to see people with their clothes covered with soot and cinders as the first of the Wall Streeters began to arrive in Midtown. More information seeped out. There had also been an attack at the Pentagon and it was reported that additional commercial airliners were not responding. Jet fighters could be seen flying up the East River. Long portions of the day were a blur of trying to assimilate the incremental information which, over time, began to coalesce into a stark reality
When they finally got the trains running out of Grand Central that afternoon, I arrived home and we began to put a more personal face on the casualties. Among the missing was our friend’s daughter, recently married, and newly pregnant with her first child. She worked at Cantor Fitzgerald and along with hundreds of her co-workers was missing We began to understand the reality of just what “missing’ meant in the context of the mountain of smoking remains at what came to be called ground zero and began to taste the bitter futility of dashed hope. In neighborhoods all over greater New York, the tragedy struck painfully close to home.
And long after these events dropped from prominence in the national news, the wreckage at ground zero continued to smolder as crews continued to search for victims and knots of firefighters in their dress uniforms made their way to St. Patrick’s Cathedral for still another heartbreaking farewell to a comrade.
We would eventually learn a great deal about the perpetrators of this horrific crime, their names and faces becoming all too familiar. And we learned how easily they had come to America, taking advantage of our free society, to scheme and plot, even to obtain aeronautical training so as to be able to execute on their vicious plans Our country’s vaunted intelligence agencies, perhaps still organized to fight the old cold war, missed the clues and the chance at prevention but I don’t think many of us had any idea of the presence of those among us with such pure evil in their hearts. We still ask ourselves what kind of people would fly plane loads of passengers into buildings? And the big question remains: why? What did they hope to gain? What exactly was the payoff they were seeking? We learned about widespread desire for martyrdom and the gibberish of its rewards, but the basic question still remains. Why?
They came to the United States, and used covert means to achieve nothing less than a vicious military attack against our civilian population. To try and explain these actions with a rationale of religious, and/or political goals obscures the essential evil of their nature. History has shown that appeasement of such factions has only strengthened their determination. The threat posed by such factions must be met with all the resources of this great country including military reprisals, however unpopular. Those committed to the politicization of our very survival as a nation, who call for passivity in favor of some vague prescriptive for a heavier reliance on reasoning and diplomacy are either implausibly naive or willing to allow the lust for political power to trump even the defense of our most basic values. They must be reminded that it is the aggressive preservation of our way of life that allows them to hold their contrary views, no matter how inappropriate they might be.
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