In a quiet TV ad that has been running in the New York market, people silently show where they were on 9/11, when they heard the news. A woman sitting on her bed leans over slightly; a man stands in what looks to be an empty firehouse common room; another man on a deserted subway platform points to an empty subway car. The isolation speaks to lost loved ones and comrades not in the picture, to the aloneness of grief that has not subsided.
The ad is for an organization seeking to get the stalled 9/11 memorial moving again. I don’t know anything about the organization, so I can’t say whether they’re the good guys or the bad guys in a politicized battle. I hope they’re the good guys.
In any event, seeing the ad, or film clips or images from 9/11, I feel the same as I did back then.
A few weeks after 9/11, some of the most powerful commercials ever made were broadcast. One of them, sponsored by Dow Jones, the stock market people, showed a few silent men in business attire standing in an office, looking into the camera. But they were not grieving. One man in particular stood out. He was a tall, broad-shouldered black man of about 40 in shirtsleeves, arms crossed, and with a grimly determined jaw. The word “strength” flashed on the screen.
Another ad, by local talk radio station WABC, showed a few well-chosen words on a backdrop of red, white, and blue, with the voices of children in the background.
There are some things from which you’re not supposed to “move on,” at least not in the public sense.
I realize that some people who lost the love of their life that day have since fallen in love with, or even married, someone else. I am the last person to begrudge them their happiness. That’s the private sense of “moving on.” Those who were directly hit on 9/11 will never feel the same about that day as the rest of us. But if someone told me he no longer felt moved at the anniversary of 9/11, I would think him less than fully human.
Not everyone feels the same.
Some qualify the worst day in American history as “one of the worst days.”
I can still remember getting up that morning at 10 a.m. As I wrote at the time, on the radio an announcer intoned, “The World Trade Center is under attack.”
We were only able to get a snow-filled picture from the local CBS affiliate (the other broadcast channels all had had their antennas on the roof of one of the WTC towers). We saw the remaining tower, amid clouds of debris from its sister tower, which had just gone down. I figured it was all an overly dramatic version of those Emergency Broadcast System tests (“This is a test... ”). But it was no test. Three thousand dead in New York, the Pentagon, and a field outside of Shanksville, Pennsylvania attest to that.
Article comments
1 - Arch Conservative
I think my favorite memory from the 911 aftermath was when Hillary Clinton was booed offstage by NYC firemen and policemen at a benefit concert.
2 - Nicholas Stix
Id forgotten about that! That was wonderful! One of my editors commented that when he saw I was writing about heroes AND heels, he was afraid the piece would go on forever.
3 - I think she’s absolutely right. Think of “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” It’s a large, raucous, expansiv
Yeah well I can't wait until the ACLU loving moonbats discover this piece and start lecturing us on how tough they are on terrorists.
4 - JP
Sad to read that article from this past Saturday. Doesn't seem like a safe program to be expanding, honestly.
Still, I must disagree here from another angle--you talk about wishing we still had the unified sense of purpose, as if we still have the same national objective we did at that time.
Immediately after 9/11, America WAS unified (and still is, I'd venture to say) in a desire to see the perpetrators brought to justice. That means Osama Bin Laden. Many of us still look forward to his capture and trial.
But then the mission expanded--the fight to bring Bin Laden to justice became the "War on Terror," first stop: Iraq. We barely had time to accept that we'd lost Bin Laden at Tora Bora before we were talking up "Shock and Awe," and a VERY QUICK WAR, to rid the world of Saddam's WMD.
As the Iraq situation has become more and more depressing, the mission has now become even more vague--to spread democracy to the Middle East. Many people don't believe our sons should be dying to "spread" our socio-economic system, or that Iraq had anything to do with 9/11, but do believe chasing and capturing Bin Laden would have been worthwhile.
The problem, in essence, is the Bush/Cheney expansion of the mission from a response to 9/11 to the grand spread of freedom to the Middle East. Bush has tried to sell this as a way to combat the prevalence of terrorism, but no-one knows if it will work. Plus, many educated individuals believe there are other strategies we could choose besides bombing people into democracy--tightening our borders, examining cargo from ships, and playing nicer with our neighbors is one example.
So if Bush wanted to change the mission and maintain the sense of unity he had to begin with, he did a poor job of selling the bait-and-switch.