A Day to Pause and Remember 9/11
NEW YORK CITY, NY – So much has been said and written about what happened on 9/11. The following day is forgotten, just another dulled interlude in the aftermath of an incoherent morning, New York Times writes.
But New Yorkers were introduced that day to irreducible presumptions about their wounded city that many believed would harden and become chiseled into the event's enduring legacy.
New York would become a fortress city, choked by apprehension and resignation, forever patrolled by soldiers and submarines. Another attack was coming. And soon.
Tourists? Well, who would ever come again? Work in one of the city's skyscrapers? Not likely. The Fire Department, gutted by 343 deaths, could never recuperate.
If a crippled downtown Manhattan were to have any chance of regeneration, ground zero had to be rebuilt quickly, a bricks and mortar nose-thumbing to terror.
On Sept. 11, American Express had its headquarters at the southwest corner of West and Vesey Streets. It is still there. Since then, Verizon has settled its headquarters into the northeast corner. Goldman Sachs has assumed the northwest. All that’s missing is the southeast corner.
Eight years later, the Sept. 11 attacks are pages in the history books to a generation that's too young to recall them, Washington Post reads.
Eight years later, this is an example of what Sept. 11, 2001, has become for a generation that's too young to remember much, if anything, about that day: It is an educational DVD, a 167-page textbook, a black binder of class handouts titled "A National Interdisciplinary Curriculum." In Room C215 at Lincoln High School in New York City, images of the collapsing Manhattan skyline are now a classroom "warm-up exercise." "Militant," "imploding" and "rubble" are boldfaced vocabulary words for students to memorize. Homework assignments and essay questions ensure that Sept. 11 will indeed be remembered by millions of schoolchildren, if with a new sense of detachment.
Eight years ago this morning, terrorists commandeered two passenger jets that took off from Logan Airport and flew them into the World Trade Center. Another was taken over that crashed into the Pentagon and a final one that crash landed in Pennsylvania. That attack forever changed the nation's mindset, Boston Globe says. But for loved ones of the 3,000 people who were killed that day this date will always represent a personal tragedy as well. Many victims' families, in conjunction with community-service groups, are asking their fellow citizens to commemorate that grievous loss by giving more of themselves. Fittingly, President Obama signed legislation earlier this year designating the anniversary of the attacks as a "national day of service and remembrance." Eight years on, Sept. 11 remains both a day for somber contemplation and a reminder of the obligations all Americans have to one another.
Americans are almost 3,000 days removed from the Sept. 11 terror attacks that toppled the World Trade Center and killed 3,000 people - nearly the same amount of time it took al Qaeda plotters to regroup from their failed bid to take down the Twin Towers in 1993, Washington Times reads.
While former New York City Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani says not a day goes by that he doesn't think of Sept. 11, for most Americans, that crisp, sunny morning of horror seems a lifetime ago, and, frankly, something they'd rather forget.
"It's natural - as time goes by, people's memories fade, they move on to other things. The important thing is that people in the country realize, whether they remember it as vividly as they did then, that it's not part of our history. This is part of our present," Mr. Giuliani said.
"The same forces that attacked us on Sept. 11 are alive and planning and plotting. It's something we haven't resolved yet, so we'd better remember it in that sense, and some of the lessons that we've learned from it."
Adapted from New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe and Focus News Information Agency.
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