The Legacy of 9/11 and America's Triumph Over Tragedy
A dozen years have now passed since that sunny day back in September of 2001 when all of us watched and witnessed the incomprehensible … planes hitting skyscrapers, people running for their lives, and buildings crumbling to dust. These were not scenes on a satellite feed of a third world coup. This was not the work of VFX artists demolishing a mini city in some Hollywood special effects studio.
They were real planes … ones that we had all taken on business trips and on holidays. The buildings were storied American landmarks. The people were ordinary citizens going to work … stopping for a newspaper, stepping off a subway, or arriving at their desk. It was the ordinary nature of everything about that day that makes it linger.
We watched it over and over … the first plane, the second plane, The North Tower, The South Tower, the Pentagon, and then Shanksvillle. No matter where you were on September 11th 2001, we were all with the 247 people on the flights, the 351 fireman, paramedics and EMT’s on the stairs, the 60 police officers inside the towers, and the 2977 souls in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania that perished on what was an ordinary weekday. Over 3000 children lost parents and 115 nations lost citizens in the attack, and America embraced each of them as their own.
Paper fell from the sky for days … memos, reports, hand written notes that somehow survived what steel could not. The colossal tangle of broken planes, melted girders, and collapsed concrete smoldered and burned for over three months. A deadly cloud of dust and ruin covered Manhattan for nearly a year. The Dow dropped 684 points. The New York Stock exchange was closed for 6 days. The economic loss to New York City was over $105 billion.
It was hard to imagine a time when it would all get better. But slowly it did. Over 1.5 tons of debris was eventually removed from the World Trade Center site and re-building and design concepts poured in, all preserving the original footprints of the Twin Towers. The Pentagon was re-built within a year. A temporary memorial to Flight 93 covered a hillside in Pennsylvania, some 500 yards from the crash site followed by a National Memorial years later. America was healing.
On September 11th, we gained a unique understanding of what it means to live freely. Whether our American story is the by-product of adversity or the desire for opportunity … those that came before us risked everything for a better life, a better way, and a chance at self-determination. While we lost our innocence on that sunny, Tuesday morning … we gained a collective strength that has sustained us these dozen years. The attacks did not divide us, they united us. We were not broken by terror, we were made whole by the countless acts of kindness, courage, and compassion that followed.
There were innumerable accounts of bravery and extraordinary self-sacrifice during the attacks … from young rescuers on a stairwell climbing toward disaster, to the injured carrying the more severely injured to safety, to the average citizens … husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters that fought back at 30,000 feet to prevent unimaginable carnage on the ground … knowing they themselves would never survive.
Ultimately, September 11th is a day for heroes. The ones we lost, the ones that remain, and the ones inside each of us that went back to work, got back on a plane, and carried on with our lives living freely and unafraid.