Never forget.
Sunday, September 11, 2011 at 8:46 am Mountain Time
Above left: Becky’s phone call to me the morning of 9/11. Above right: my audio montage of speeches about 9/11.
A full account of my memories of September 11, 2001 can be found here. (I wrote it up last year.)
Photos of NYC on the second anniversary of 9/11, when the above “Tribute in Light” shot was taken, are here.
Photos of my June 3, 2001 trip to the WTC — exactly 100 days before 9/11 — are here.
My normal homepage is here.
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September 11th, 2011 at 1:02 am Mountain Time
Thanks. Excellent – as Always.
Like Mom, I feel that the time is now coming when we as a nation can (as They Say) “move on” — whilst still, Never forgetting.
(It helps – though not being finally Dispositive – to know that bin Laden, at long last, sleeps with the fishes.)
September 12th, 2011 at 9:36 am Mountain Time
I’m never sure what “moving on” means in any context, let alone this one. Everybody grieves in their own way, and in the case of a national tragedy caused by a terrorist atrocity, that includes not just the folks directly affected but, well, everyone (though of course the folks directly affected have much more to grieve). Personally, I don’t know if I’ll ever stop getting that awful feeling in the pit of my stomach, somewhat unpredictably, in reaction to this or that nugget of information when re-reading or re-watching accounts of that day. I never know exactly what detail or image is going to get me (that’s what I mean by “unpredictably”), but something always does. I suspect the only thing that might change this reaction, actually, is if we got hit by multiple terrorist attacks of a similar magnitude to 9/11, forcing me to become somewhat more “numb” to that feeling of empty, unfathomable, unbelievable horror that memories of 9/11 still invoke. Thank God that hasn’t happened yet — a fact that seemed implausible a decade ago — and hopefully it won’t.
In any event, I certainly do expect that the anniversaries will be more subdued from this point forward. The 20th or 25th anniversaries will be a big deal again, but more as the anniversary of a historic event, like the way the anniversary of JFK’s assassination was when I was a kid (or Pearl Harbor when you were a kid, I imagine), instead of the anniversary of something that still feels raw and current. It’s weird enough that there are 4th and 5th graders who weren’t born when 9/11 happened, and college students who were in 4th or 5th grade… by the 20th anniversary, there will be college students who weren’t born, and people my age who were in 4th and 5th grade. The folks who were in college on 9/11 (i.e., me) will be approaching middle age.
Amazing how time marches on.
September 12th, 2011 at 9:45 am Mountain Time
Correction: “an historical event.” #brendanFAIL
September 12th, 2011 at 1:30 pm Mountain Time
Correction “a historical event.”
September 12th, 2011 at 1:57 pm Mountain Time
“I’m never sure what ‘moving on’ means in any context, let alone this one…In any event, I certainly do expect that the anniversaries will be more subdued from this point forward…”
To me at least, your expectation, as elaborated, is Exactly what it means in this context.
David K., let us pray that it forever remains an ahistorical event, in the (perhaps definitionally Elastic :) sense of an assault not only unprecedented (which it Is) but also Unrepeated: a One-off. (An one-off? / No. :)
September 12th, 2011 at 3:09 pm Mountain Time
Noonan gets it pretty much right: