Ramona's picture

    9/11/2001. It Will Be With Us Forever.

    Today marks the 12th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. (Note: This is adapted from a post I wrote on this anniversary two years ago.)  Twelve years have passed -- more than a decade -- but for those closest to the terror, for those whose loved ones were caught in that unimaginable rage storm, for those who trained for this, who mobilized and fought so hard to try and save the lives already lost to them, we pay tribute by refusing to forget.

    The pictures are all that is left.  They stay with us and resonate as terrible, beautiful works of art.
     

     

    The agony of the men and women who could do nothing but stand by and watch the towers fall reflected and drove home our own agony -- even those of us in the hinterlands who watched the horrific events unfold on our TV screens, helpless to do anything but gasp and moan and rock with a kind of psychic pain most of us had never felt in our entire lifetimes.
     

     

    As painful as the dredging up of the images of that terrible day is to us, there is no sense of dread as the annual anniversaries approach.  Every year, on September 11, we want to remember.  9/11 has become a watchword.  Nobody in America has to be told what those numbers represent.  
     


    As I write this, they're reciting the names of the men and women lost to us on September 11, 2001 in a ceremony to honor the dead.  The names are being read alphabetically.  For one brief moment the people live again.  We do this for their families and for us.  They're not just numbers or actors in an unimaginable event that became the catalyst for an entire decade that changed all of our lives forever.  We need to keep their memories alive in order to recognize their humanity, and possibly our own.
     


    We remember.  We remember.  We'll always remember.

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    Thank you for this.


    We need to remember.

    I felt that cable handled this history rather well today.


      Unfortunately, I can't think of  9/11 without thinking of the Iraq war.


    Really?  Maybe on this one day you could set that aside and give some attention to those who lost their lives.  This is the anniversary of an event that had nothing to do with Iraq. 

    It never did and it never will.


       It does have something to do with Iraq, since 9/11 made the Iraq war possible.


    Lovely, Ramona. And beautifully arranged photo's, haunting as they are.

    As an aside, I had planned to go to New York on our mutual birthday that year and actually went. It was surreal.


    Oxy, I can't even imagine what it must have been like that close to the tragedy that was 9/11.  It seemed surreal from my vantage point, too, but I was watching it on a television set 800 miles away and in the northern woods.  I could go outside and forget for a moment that it had happened.  The people in and around NYC couldn't do that. Not for a very long time.


    Another image from 9/11:


    That picture was taken just a few miles from my home.  We watched Air Force One take off that day. Every December my mother would remind us about Pearl Harbor Day.  This generation will also do that the rest of their lives reminding their families about Nine Eleven.


    Momoe, yes, there are three dates that stick with me and that I'll never forget:  December 7, 1941, November 22, 1963, and September 11, 2001.

    Pearl Harbor Day was always recognized when I was growing up, and for years the headlines on 11/22 were all about Kennedy's assassination. 

    You're right that 9/11 will be this generation's Pearl Harbor.  Let's hope nothing else on that scale will come along to take its place.


    Later that day Bush and the White House staff started on CIPRO, and even columnist Richard Cohen got tips on CIPRO before the first anthrax letter was mailed (Slate, 3/2008):

    ...I had been told soon after Sept. 11 to secure Cipro, the antidote to anthrax. The tip had come in a roundabout way from a high government official, and I immediately acted on it. I was carrying Cipro way before most people had ever heard of it...

    Anthrax being a WMD, the initial rationale for invading Iraq. Turned out it was our anthrax, not Saddam's.

    Of course I believe everything GWB and Cheney ever said about 9/11, including what they told the Commission, though no transcript or recording was made of that short session.


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