Tenth anniversary

I will be away this weekend, and, so, will not be exposed to/glued to all the ten-years-on remembrances of the terrible events of 9/11.

I no longer recall how many weeks it took me before I could lay me down to sleep without replaying the images of the planes flying into the twin towers; the hand-in-hand colleagues jumping to their deaths – and my stupid hopes that some of them would have landed on a soft, bouncy surface and survived; the pancaking buildings; the dust-covered crowds fleeing lower Manhattan; the firefighters going in and, later, the firefighters working Ground Zero, no longer looking for survivors but looking for the bodies of friends, brothers, fathers, sons.

What did we take from all this?

We already knew, didn’t we, that evil exists, and that there are people who can be called to insanity when driven by warped, burning zealotry? We already knew, didn’t we, that bravery and goodness exist, too? That firefighters and cops and EMT’s and pilots and flight attendants and passengers and people at work and strangers on the street can step up and act with more concern for shared humanity than for personal safety.

I’m naïve enough to have hoped that we’d have become better as a nation since then, and realistic enough to know that we’ve gotten worse. Unraveling, unraveled, divided, falling.

I’d don’t think that there’s a direct post hoc ergo propter hoc going on there. But 9/11 sure didn’t help.

I’m glad I’ll be missing the barrage of 9/11 news, documentaries, commentaries that will no doubt be broadcast this weekend.

Before I leave for the weekend, I’ll drop by the memorial to the local 9/11 victims – mostly folks on the airplanes – that’s located in the Public Garden, just across the street.

I will think about those fathers, mothers, daughters, sons, brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, cousins, friends, who spent their last moments in the company of twisted zealots like Mohammed Atta, rather than with their loved ones.

Life can be so very fragile…

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Pink Slip is not averse to recycling older posts when they're still relevant and still work. Two years ago, I wrote a post entitled “Just Another Day at the Office,” that is still worth a read.