A view from the south, photographed on a clear day, last Saturday, from a boat called Miss Liberty.
We mourn the missing towers and the human beings who died there 6 years ago today.
११ सप्टेंबर, २००७
Lower Manhattan, seen from the harbor.
A view from the south, photographed on a clear day, last Saturday, from a boat called Miss Liberty.
We mourn the missing towers and the human beings who died there 6 years ago today.
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And we mourn too, of course, those who died in Washington and Pennsylvania.
New York has such a beautiful physical setting.
I hope this day includes comfort to those who lost someone special.
WE mourn, but we should mourn less and less with time, just as we all move on past other personal or national tragedies.
In the 6 years since 2800 people were killed by unlawful enemy combatants on a mission, 12.8 million Americans have died, many tragically.
Dispatch came on the air at 0700 today with a universal tone for all emergency services workers in the county, requesting a minute of silence in memory of those who lost their lives trying to save others. As on previous anniversaries of the date, I teared up.
Jesus this turning into the blog equivalent of your Oscar clip.
Stop milking it.
The sad part is that the only surprising thing about Doyle's comment is how long it took for one or another ADS to make it. Show some respect, would ya?
thank you Simon. I had 22 people I knew through work who were crushed and turned to dust and no remains found plus another 28 who died with remains..sometimes just a finger bone...and this guy wants us to 'move on'.
My daughter left work in Tower I on a temp assignment at 830 and I met her for a father/daughter breakfast not far from there. If you think that I will ever for a second forget that my daughter nearly got caught in that you go straight to hell.
Sorry, but not in my lifetime.
I'm sorry but Ann is a tourist, not a grieving 9/11 victim. The latter deserve respect, the former should go easy on the drama.
I'm sorry but Ann is a tourist, not a grieving 9/11 victim.
Anyone with a heart still grieves the victims of the 9/11 attack. The apartment looks right out at the skyline; what would YOU be thinking about if you were there, looking at that, on the anniversary of 9/11? Something's wrong with you that your knee-jerk reaction is "stop talking about it."
hd, a sigh of relief for you and your daughter.
hdhouse said...
"My daughter left work in Tower I on a temp assignment at 830 and I met her for a father/daughter breakfast not far from there."
Not that it remotely compares, I know, but a friend of friend had an appointment in one of the towers for 9am that morning, but she missed her plane.
There have to be so many stories of people who would have been in the towers or the Pentagon, or in the planes, but for some reason weren't, and - Barbara Olson springs to mind - shouldn't have been but were. I reluctantly watched United 93 for the first time this week, and they show a guy running late desperately rushing to make the plane, and guess what - his lucky day, he just makes it.
Another leftist commandment revealed: only those who lost someone on 9/11 are allowed to grieve, or even mention the attacks. Similar to, only those who fought in a war are allowed to comment on Iraq.
Ditto what hd said: go to hell.
For some things there is a sadness beyond words, leaving even poets silenced.
The inability to feel a personal wound from this, even lacking a family member turned to dust, is no measure of maturity or superiority. It is a shameful thing, to lack compassion for so broad a loss to this nation, made more shameful by admonishing others to abjure their sorrow.
While we need not wallow in pity, or rage like a child, we owe the dead at least our heads bowed in silence, and to let other grieve as they will, unmolested by your own better sense that it's time to forget.
Forgetting is dishonorable.
To advise forgetting is disrespectful.
Forgetting is dishonorable.
To advise forgetting is disrespectful.
The first sentence ignores the natural variability people have in processing and retaining information. (The second phrase is more spot on -- To advise forgetting is right up there with I know how you're feeling). I think, though, that if people still feel the same sharp stab that they felt 6 years ago, then they either need help in processing the information or different help, if they've already sought/had help.
Six years is a long and unhealthy time to be trapped in one painful spot emotionally.
But then I know no one who was killed. I only no someone who knows someone. What does my opinion mean?
I mean that forgetting is dishonorable in the same way that we would dishonor World War II veterans by forgetting their sacrifice, and never speaking of it again, simply to "move on".
Whenever I think of family members that have died, I can, though briefly, feel that same sharp pain. It doesn't imply that I stay mired in pity, but such wounds are rather shallow, and easily uncovered by the oddest of triggers, like the way someone's hair moves, a certain laugh, an old photograph, or two lights shown in the sky.
Pogo,
Thank you for the moving and eloquent reminders for this day, on this post and another.
Ditto for the Professor's photo homage to the city, our country's loss and rebound spirit.
I can, though briefly, feel that same sharp pain
One of the most poignant things I've ever been party to occurred here in Madison. I flew back from Europe into O'Hare, and then took the Alco Bus back to the Memorial Union; there was no one to pick me up, so I walked with all my luggage (two cumbersome suitcases) the 2 miles or so to my house, around dusk. I was about a block from my house when a middle-aged woman in a car stopped and asked if I wanted a ride. I politely declined, but my face must've betrayed a little anxiety because she explained that my posture and gait resembled that of her dead son. And that she frequently went out driving to see if she could spot him walking. I imagine that for a split second when she saw me out of the corner of her eye, her heart leapt with joy at the thought that her son was still alive and right there on the street. And then reality crashed down on her.
PatCA said...
Another leftist commandment revealed: only those who lost someone on 9/11 are allowed to grieve, or even mention the attacks. Similar to, only those who fought in a war are allowed to comment on Iraq."
I'm not sure that is what anyone said.
Harry - I think that's pretty much the only way to read Doyle's 9:47 AM comment, which disparages Ann's post (either its text or possibly the mere act of her posting on the subject today) on the grounds that she is a "tourist" as opposed to a "grieving 9/11 victim," and so should "go easy on the drama" when reflecting on 9/11. Since this was hardly a dramatic or overwrought post, I don't know that there's any way to take his comments other than as PatCA did.
Of course it's what he said at 9:47, which itself was an attempt to walk back his insulting comment of 9:04.
"...she explained that my posture and gait resembled that of her dead son."
How sad.
The heart sees such patterns in the smallest of things, as through a glass darkly, hoping to meet once again face to face.
What an odd bit of grace that placed you there, for her to see you, and remember him. At once sorry and hopeful.
Obviously, no one can dictate when/if someone else should or shouldn't stop paying respects to those who have passed. End of story.
That said, at what point on a national level (i.e. those not directly affected) will the mourning and hyper consciousness of the event end? I'm not saying that it should or shouldn't...but just wondering what people think.
When will the events of 9/11 be treated like, say, Pearl Harbor? Is it just a "time" thing? Is this question offensive? I don't know.
When will the events of 9/11 be treated like, say, Pearl Harbor?
When it stops being politically useful for people like Ann.
ZPS - I don't know when Pearl Harbor faded from routine observance, but I'm willing to bet it wasn't before we'd defeated the enemy who attacked us that day.
I don't think that we can say, prospectively, "9/11 will be a big deal every year until X" - we'll only know in hindsight if and when it happens.
"When will the events of 9/11 be treated like, say, Pearl Harbor?"
Tough question.
When a sizeable minority (or even possibly a majority) denies to those remaining the very meaning required to construct a coherent narrative on which is based effective healing, the event can become a monolith, obscuring all light.
For example, some Vets are able to return and live on, scarred but not overwhelmed. But for some their wounds continue to fester, unable to answer "what happened to me and why?". That is, they cannot yet tell the story.
In the memoir Lucky, Alice Sebold wrote how when she was a college freshman at Syracuse, "she was attacked and raped on the last night of school, forced onto the ground in a tunnel "among the dead leaves and broken beer bottles." In a ham-handed attempt to mollify her, a policeman later told her that a young woman had been murdered there and, by comparison, Sebold should consider herself lucky."
That violence forever changed her life. Sebold subsequently became addicted to heroin. Over time, she came around. Her ability to tell her story was no small part, I think.
It led to her novel The Lovely Bones, which is now being made into a movie.
Pearl harbor was recognized by the nation as a whole as a trauma, and for that reason the 'Greatest Generation' put it behind them (but remembered it well). We'll have more difficulty with 9/11, seeing as it remains a disputed incident.
I didn't mean "routine observance." I think everyone knows the difference between the way Pearl Harbor is commemorated and the way 9/11 is commemorated.
I work in Rockefeller Center and in the elevator today I heard two women complaining about bagpipes. One said that it reminded her of 9/11 and death and funerals. The other agreed and said she was "sick of it all--it's been 6 years!" Then they decided where they were going to grab lunch.
These were New York women. Tough broads, and probably (undoubtedly) didn't lose anyone. But still.
Not everyone wants to keep mourning. If people want to move on, they should be allowed to without being labeled crass or disrespectful.
When will the events of 9/11 be treated like, say, Pearl Harbor?
When it stops being politically uncomfortable for people like Doyle.
Listen to Pogo: "We can't get past it because liberals don't believe it was a trauma."
Nice.
"Not everyone wants to keep mourning."
And some don't want to mourn at all. Ever. Further, they want others to stop even these remebrances, lest they intrude on their soup and salad, there in the shadow of two lost towers.
It's the "more aggrieved than thou" attitude of wingnuts that is really distasteful. If you don't see it in Ann's recent posts (and I'll concede you might have to be wary of it, knowing her "9/11 changed everything" politics), Pogo has been nice enough to make it explicit.
No, I think it's the "aggrieved at all" attitude you really find distasteful.
And who would be so crass to think that 9/11 changed anything, much less everything?
Outside of a little dust and fewer lives than are lost to pneumonia each year, what tragedy?
"See what I mean?"
Yeah, man.
When are the ever gonna shut up about the freakin' Holocaust? It's been 40 years! Move On!
Pogo, I think it's scurrilous to accuse Doyle thus. I'm sure that he felt awful about every single liberal who died in the attacks.
Isn't it wonderful how 9/11 brought us all closer together? I think it's the shared sense of community that's descended on America since that day that's its most enduring legacy. The way America is more united today than it was before.
Sick puppies.
Doyle's real problem is that he is a Met fan...they are sad, bitter people...best avoided at all costs
Haven't checked the standings lately, then. Or heard about the triumphant return of one Pedro Martinez.
The sun will shine on a dogs ass once in it's life...Pedro already had his time in the sun...we know who is his daddy.
David Wright and Jose Reyes are going to keep the sun shining on Shea/Citi Field for many years to come.
Take it easy there Eddie Kranepool...we will see you in the series...but I do want to tell you that I regard you as the Choo-Choo Coleman of commentators on this blog.
I don't know who that is, but I'll assume it's a complement.
Yankee fan, btw?
Weird, when we start talking about baseball, Doyle turns into a human being. I guess all that stuff about sports bringing people together is true.
See typical Met fan...oblivious to the glorious history of his franchise...yes most definitely...
think David Wells as a Yankee at his most drunk and quarrelsome
Palladian, sports and cooking will do it everytime...it brings civility back to the conversation.
I wonder if Osama would go for a game of catch.
Or Mumbly Peg.
Osama is definitely a catcher...especially if Omar Sharif is the pitcher.
Simon wrote:
Isn't it wonderful how 9/11 brought us all closer together?
Simon, can you explain why the country did not remain united for a longer period of time?
Cyrus, maybe it started here:
... in his online journal dated September 12th, 2001, [Michael]Moore stated the following: “Many families have been devastated tonight. This just is not right. They did not deserve to die. If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE [sic] for him! Boston, New York, DC, and the planes' destination of California — these were places that voted AGAINST [sic] Bush! Why kill them?” and, seemingly referring to the blame Bush has for the attacks, “In just 8 months, Bush [got] the whole world back to hating us again.”
Just a thought.
Why the [sic] in the quoted paragraph?
I'm assuming the person whom you quote is on some kind of diatribe against Michael Moore. They have apparently ignored the If in the sentence.
Not sure, MM. The quote's pulled from here:
http://stanfordreview.org/Archive/Volume_XXVIII/Issue_4/Opinion/opinion2.shtml
but it's not unique to this site. This was widely reported at the time. It can't be linked to at Moore's site, because he pulled it down a few days later.
And the "if" does not temper the sentiment being expressed.
Cyrus, that's pretty simple to explain. What happened was that while the dust was still settling, the left -- which had never accepted the legitimacy of Bush's election, and which was then as now implacably hostile to his platform -- seized on September 11th as a reason to exhort that Bush set aside his agenda. What Bush ought to do, the left argued, was to bring the country together - by forgetting about that platform the people who voted for him supported, and instead adopting the platform they urged instead. Bush confirmed his standing as a blackguard by refusing their wise counsel, and instead governing (for better and often worse) according to his own beliefs instead of those of the editorial board of the New York Times.
Hostility to Bush and the GOP mounted on the left as the administration continued to adopt policies that the left disapproved of, and began to reach incoherence and fever pitch when astonishingly, those idiotic American voters failed to agree with them in 2004. Now, to add insult to injury, the left couldn't even call him an illegitimate President any more. That this has rendered them - particularly the MSM by keeping up a constant drumbeat for surrender and retreat - as (functionally speaking) a Fifth Column for the insurgency doesn't seem to have crossed their minds. Still, capitalizing on this grassroots rancor, liberal politicians began to realize that all this anger could propel them back into the majority, and so started pandering, dragging the mainstream of the Democratic party across the abyss; some, to their immense credit (Ann, Lieberman, etc) refused to go along with it. This strategy bore fruit last fall, but the base has become even more incandescent and fractious with the realization that they've been played for dupes by a Democratic Party that has the power but absolutely no inclination to actually end the war.
I should add, the real question is whether they'll resort to actual violence if they lose next fall.
Simon,
It seems the short answer, according to you, is that "the left" is to blame. Although I was fairly confident that you'd answer with something like this, I was hoping for a less partisan response.
You've stated that you are mourning today and as a matter of respect, I won't challenge your answer. However, to the extent that you believe the country would be better served without the tremendous political divisiveness (you admire Althouse and Lieberman for not being driven by partisanship, for example), may I suggest that you reflect on how "the right" has contributed to this problem and lead by example in taking corrective action?
Simon that is the same exact question I have about Met fans...a scary thought all the way around.
ZPS - That said, at what point on a national level (i.e. those not directly affected) will the mourning and hyper consciousness of the event end? I'm not saying that it should or shouldn't...but just wondering what people think.
When will the events of 9/11 be treated like, say, Pearl Harbor? Is it just a "time" thing? Is this question offensive? I don't know...
Good question. We have 365 days in a year, and people that want to shove their grief or sense of a day where "tragedy changed everything" onto the public for ritualized, permanent mass ceremony that it would be "crass, unfeeling, selfish" to ignore.
Other "Days that changed everything that must be mourned for all eternity:"
1. Lincoln's assassination Commemoration.
2. The Boxing Day Tsunami when 120000 died.
3. The Galveston Hurricane Day
4. Katrina Day.
5. Pearl Harbor Day.
6. Antitiem Day.
7. Remembrance day for the 60,000 Americans and 7,000,000 others who died in WWI.
8. POW/MIA Day.
9. Police Officer's Memorial day where clout has the falgs lowered nation-wide.
10. Johnstown Flood Day.
11. JFK's assassination day.
12. Martyr Martin Day.
13. Dead President's Day.
14. Anniversary of FDR's death.
15. Various Days of various great mining disasters.
16. The Day Titanic Sunk.
17. Armenian Genocide Day.
18. Firefighter's Day.
19. The suggested "Native America Holocaust Day"
20. National Breast Cancer Victim's Day.
21. The European Jew Holocaust Day.
22. The Ukranian Holomodor (Genocide) Day.
23. The proposed "Irish Potato Famine" Remembrance Day.
24. Memorial Day.
25. Gettysburg Day.
26. San Francisco Earthquake Day, which "changed everything!".
27. National Sex Crimes Victim's Day.
28. Hiroshima and Nagasaki Mourning Day (for the Left - why Dresden, Coventry, Hamburg, and Tokyo/Yokohama bombings that killed as many, a little less , more is ignored is unknown.)
29. Chicago fire day
30. National abortion victims Remembrance Day. (33-38 million abortions in the US since 1973)
OK, that is just one month of present and proposed "National Mourning Days" add in all the purely local stuff "1957 Wildcats Basketball Team killed in flight to Yuma." I think if we really worked at getting to a culture of eternal Mourning, each day of our lives could be filled with personal mourning or mourning society tells us we must honor, or we are "insensitive" to potato blight victims or such.
And people are smart enough to know that slow attrition produces more "victims of tragedy" - than big one day tragedies like the Tsunami that the media loves more than the dribs and drabs of colon cancer victims that pile up to a larger figure over a year's time..
There is definitely a trend of people "pushing" a Culture of Grief, eternal Victimization, and Obligated Societal Recognition of Communal Mourning.
Roadsides are getting piled up at sites with "accident memorial" crap.
Certain cemeteries look like landfills from a distance.
Employees are demanding dead employee memorials be put up like the treatment cops get..
A state adjacent to me has had it's flag at half-staff for various dignitaries and soldiers dying of any reason in Iraq and Kuwait(1st war in history flags are required to go down from date any soldier who lived or used to live in State until internment). One soldier who overturned a truck in Kuwait resulted in the flag at half-staff for 22 days because family disputed his "right" to be put in Arlington - almost as much obligated "mourning" for the poor private as the excessive 30 days of half-Staff Gerry Ford merited.
At work today, everyone was supposed to show their subordinates how "sensitive and empathetic" they were by us leading a "minute of silence" for the "heroes" who died on 9/11. Hero cops, hero officeworkers, hero Pentagon soldiers, plane passengers, firefighters.
No one really wanted to do it.
Better than the 1st year when the "immortal names" were read off at work..
Finishing on the adjacent state - Story notes that the state had ordered all flags to half-staff for between 38-43% of the time. mainly for the 1-3 week stretches when "heroes in the military die". Story mentions controversies.
Like extending it to state residents in the military who die in the US.
The "Outrage" of certain soldier families at suggestions that the 2-3 weeks of half-staff are too long and need to be lessened to day of internment.
People interviewed on the street asked why a flag was at half-staff, who was being "officially mourned" and no one knowing...
"Well, no President has died..some soldier, I guess".
"I used to ask why it was half staff. Now I don't even notice.."
"It's all for show"
"I own a business. Where the flag was supposed to be used to be easy to know. Then it got so hard to follow, customers were complaining "No, it should be down! No it should be up!" I just got sick of it and got rid of the flagpole. No body even noticed it was gone."
Others may try to down play it, but I'll never forget or step aside as others try to minimize it as just another unfortunate thing that happened, just like other unfortunate things that happen.
It was different, and those who miss that have lost their souls, if they ever had one.
Cedarford, shouldn't you be getting ready for Rosh Hashanah.
"Simon, can you explain why the country did not remain united for a longer period of time?"
I can.
Because we did not agree on the root causes, nor did we agree on the solutions. The two opposing views were and are so diametrically opposed that there was no room for compromise.
And as such, partisanship ruled the day, with each side claiming the other side fired first, as is usually the case in war (politics is war by other means).
American unity died in the crossfire, and eventually we in the middle are going to have to choose sides, if we want to or not.
has it come to this that even the time of remembering almost 3,000 dead results in political recriminations? that is so sad--shame on all of those unfeeling morons who feel compelled to recall the deaths of innocents only thru a political lens. Shame Shame Shame
Trooper York -
Shouldn't you be getting ready for Jack Ruby Day?
Roger said...
has it come to this that even the time of remembering almost 3,000 dead results in political recriminations? that is so sad--shame on all of those unfeeling morons who feel compelled to recall the deaths of innocents only thru a political lens. Shame Shame Shame
Both sides did it. It was a pretty succesful attack by Islamists on an open nation that refused to question why 7-8 enemy conbatants inc. Atta, were stopped and let go rather than "intrude" on their status of being lawfully in the midst of their enemy infidels, or not.
Rightists became concerned with little military, State Dept boosting - with maximum tax cuts for the wealthy.
Liberals and hard-core Lefties became obsessed with evil Americans and "precious Jihadi civil liberties Bush-Hitler wished to trammel upon."
No, both sides didn't do it.
Assholes did it.
That there are assholes in every part of the political spectrum should not come as any surprise.
But the root cause is that they are assholes. We should react to them as such.
Absolutely, Jack was a good man....he did the right thing...but his holiday is always on a Tuesday in November...so there is still time yet..
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