Do you?
I won't forget. Ever.
Will you?
Sadly though, you are no safer traveling today than you were 9/10/01. Lots of money has been spent, and lots of Security Theater, but no safer. The muslim Extremist are, in fact, greatly emboldened.
Be safe.
Remember.
3 comments:
I live in the NYC metro area. As a young boy, perhaps 10 or so, my dad took me in to see the giant holes they'd dug in the ground for the foundations for the tow main towers. He told me about how they planned to build the two tallest buildings in the world, bigger even than the Empire State Building. He mentioned that there was disagreement about whether it could be done let alone be useful.
It was such a spectacular sight that I remember this little father-son moment.
A few years later, when I was 13 or 14, a buddy and I rode the train into NYC on a Saturday for the purpose seeing how far up the skeleton of a tower we could get. IIRC the entire skeletons were in place by then. We made it about 14 floors or so before some worker spotted us and chased us away.
As I matured I would often spot them on a clear day while commuting to work and, while not common, would have business in one or the other tower several times a year. The company I worked for on 9/11 at that time had an office in the North tower and I knew many people there. All escaped safely.
On the morning of 9/11 itself I was engaged in an annual meeting with one of our largest customers as were several other of my coworkers. We arrived on the customer site to find the TVs in their meeting center showing the first tower burning. Then we watched the second plane hit. Within a couple hours we could step outside and see the huge smoke trail working its way south along the shoreline.
Throughout the day hundreds, probably thousands, of people lined up at the hospitals and blood banks to donate blood. All trauma and emergency facilities were on standby, but the expected thousands of injured never materialized. People either escaped or died.
Numerous people with us that morning, including me, had coworkers, spouses, other relatives, and friends working in the towers. It is hard for those who do not live in the immediate NYC metro area to fathom what an ordinary part of ordinary life those towers actually were. Tens of thousands of people a day passed through them. 50,000 a day went to work in them and probably 2 or 3 times that many passed through the train station and the shops and restaurants.
We had coworkers on both planes that went into the towers and numerous ones who were landed in unexpected places around the country. Coworkers at our meeting wound up renting cars and caravanning back to where they'd flown in from.
A couple days later I ran into a coworker and friend who was in the office in the North Tower at the time. He was walking as if he'd been hit by a train. "What the heck is the matter with you?" I asked him. He replied that he'd never run so hard in his life and pulled every muscle he had doing so. "And the firefighters and medical people were running just as hard, but into it!" Next thing I knew he was teared up.
I won't forget - I went to see the giant hole in the ground after the debris was cleared. A firefighter neighbor died, way too young, of a vicious malignancy and there is little doubt the source was working in the rubble which he did for a solid week or more. My Better-two-thirds works in respiratory care. The deaths are continuing even now. I've heard, from people I believe, that the pulmonary surgeons operating on the lungs of people who worked the rubble can tell them what days they worked there based on what they find in the lung tissues.
No, I won't forget. Plenty of my fellow citizens have, and more will, but I won't.
Won't forget here either... Three friends died in the Pentagon...
I will never forget. Thank you for your kindness as well.
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