World Trade Center

This is great news, for a number of very good reasons. The Blighted One will probably try and take credit for the manhunt that was initiated by Obama’s much-maligned predecessor, George Bush. The truth is, and don’t let any of the BS we’re about to hear blasted across the airwaves fool you, that this is the culmination of a manhunt that began on September 11, 2001. It is very much like Obama to take credit for other people’s work… and ideas. No matter, it’s still a great boost to American morale.

The early hours of May 2, 2011... the crowd at Ground Zero remembers.

We found out how very close we came to bagging him during the combined ops assault on the mountain fortress of Tora Bora in December 2001. Since then, the noose has been slowly tightened by hundreds of special forces operatives and intelligence agents. I’m listening to the Dismal Failure in the White House as I’m writing this and, true to form, it’s ‘I’, ‘Me’ and ‘My’ all over the place. This may turn out to be the one highlight in Obama’s one term (from my keyboard to God’s ears) presidency.

More importantly, it tells every two-bit bad guy out there that if he becomes a big enough pain in the butt we’ll come after you and we’ll kill you. We can expect the Islamists to go ape doo doo over this. Well and good. We may as well let them know that we understand that we are in a war to the death with their seventh century cult of death.

The message is this… we may have our internal issues but our country has a way of cleansing itself of people like Barack Hussein Obama and his Marxist cabal. People in countries around the world also know that China and their puppet surrogate North Korea, Russia, Iran, Syria, and that idiot in Venezuela notwithstanding… this is, and shall remain, the greatest country in the world… and they know it.

Semper Vigilans, Semper Fidelis

© Skip MacLure 2011

It has become a cliché over the years, one that is still frequently heard. “Where were you when you heard that President Kennedy had been shot?” As time goes on, the answer will more often be along the lines that the interviewee was too young to remember, or that they were not even born yet.

A far more recent variation of the question, one that may usurp the commonality of the Kennedy enquiry, is “Where were you when you heard that the Towers had been hit?”

I certainly remember, as if it was just last week. I was having a coffee in the staff restaurant at my place of work. One of my co-workers (lovely guy, but not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer, along with a predilection for idle gossip) came in and announced that a bomb had gone off at the Trade Center.

After the attempt several years earlier, in 1993, I assumed it was another vehicle device, or one concealed in a bag. It was only when I gained access to a television that the full scale of the attack became clear, and the reality hit home.

It was a day that would change people’s attitudes, and government policies, for years, perhaps even decades, to come. This was not a grudge attack against a single entity. Rather, it was an offensive on America itself and indeed, against the free world.

Today marks Rosh Hashanah, known to many as the Jewish New Year. Traditionally, it marks a time of reflection. Perhaps, on this day, two days before the ninth anniversary of the 9-11 attacks, we should all cast our minds back to that fateful day and remember. Remember the 3,000 souls who lost their lives, the many more thousands stricken with grief by the loss of their loved ones and lastly, but by no means least, the bravery and sacrifice of the rescue services.

The new Freedom Tower

We all have our own memories from 9-11, but one that is instilled in my mind is that of the spirit of Americans as they came to terms with, perhaps, their darkest hour. There was a defiance shown to an aggressor, that had probably not been seen on such a scale since World War Two, that united the entire country.

Going forward, we must remain vigilant. Those forces of evil are still out there, some closer to home than others. There are those that would destroy America, freedom and the Constitution that guides us. On this Rosh Hashanah…. remember.

(Editor Dee is in for Skip today)

[It is another cloudless morning here in New England, just like the morning seven years ago. Back then, two planes were already in the morning sky; observers on the ground might have seen them from Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont or New York. There would be a different flight plan that day.

Today, 9/11/08, both John McCain and Barack Obama will visit Ground Zero. In honor of that visit, and in honor of that infamous and painful day, I repost a reflection I wrote several years after 9/11/01. Tomorrow, I will offer another reflection, I think, if I feel so moved.]

Yesterday morning, Friday, July 1, I walked west on Liberty Street and came to a slow stop. It was my first time to visit the World Trade Center since it became Ground Zero. I could see the wide-open 16-acre crater left in downtown Manhattan. But it was not the view that stopped me, but something much smaller. For there, in the southeast corner of Ground Zero, stood a street sign that, for me, was full of symbolic irony. I was at the corner of Church and Liberty.

I noted the irony, perhaps with bitterness touching my heart. And then I walked into the open space, tears filling my eyes, sobs erupting from deep within.

I had not expected this. I had not expected to want to fall to my knees, to wail on the ground, to daven before a new sort of Wailing Wall. I had not expected to feel that I could never leave this place; that I could never go back to something simple, safe, tidy, even naive. I had not expected to want to keep this hole in my heart; this hole from which people leapt and fell through tumult and smoke and confusion.

There was no surprise, however, at the enormity. I had always understood that; had felt it; had known its significance. I always understood the mechanics and the engineering; the aerodynamics and the flight paths. I had already stood on the ledge of a broken window; I had fallen. I had huddled with my child in the back of a plane; felt the pressure change in my ears and the turbulence of a bad pilot; I had seen the sparkling Hudson and the September blue; the smoke ahead; and I had felt the tipping of the wings as the engines were throttled full. I had waited for death to come in 3,000 different ways; and yet my imagination remained intact enough to remind me that I had not died even once.

What I had not expected were the tears. I thought that I had passed through that. I thought that I was, if not insouciant, so to speak, I was at least through with all the grief. But I was not. And clearly neither were many of the others walking by me, slowly, each pausing at various signs, reading them, performing a sort of Stations of the Cross along a postmodern Via Dolorosa. An old man, huddled against the massive, imposing fence, his long white hair and flowing beard tangled around his weary face, played an old silver flute, its dulcet tones reaching out and up, Amazing Grace trembling in my ears. He was crying in each breath.

I became quietly indignant (I was too humbled to be truly self-righteous) at those tourists from "far-away" who posed for digital cameras. And I was miffed, though only mildly, by the hawker silently moving through the crowd with a photo album, 9/11 pictures for sale, though numerous postings declared that such sacrilege was strictly forbidden. But I could forgive all this, for grief and horror do strange things to people. The abundance of cameras reminded me of a funeral I went to last spring, where the family of the 39-year-old father killed in a tragic accident gathered at the funeral parlor before the burial so that portraits could be taken around the open casket. My friend, the owner of the parlor, told me that it "happens all the time." Grief does strange things indeed.

I strolled north, stopping frequently. A young woman next to me, her back to the scene as she waited to cross Church - heading toward the Millenium Hilton - blurted into her cell phone, "I am going to get SO f***ed up tonight!" I moved away from her and closer to the fence, admitting to myself, a little sadly perhaps, that the world is indeed a very diverse place. The brown-haired woman to my right stared in disbelief westward, her lips trembling, tears on her cheeks. She wasn't thinking about getting "f***ed up." She was grieving for those who no longer could.

But there was one thing that was physically surprising to me, and beyond the scope of my imagination. It was that, with all the buildings surrounding the site, with the highest to the north, east and south, it was if I was INSIDE something, like a temple, cathedral or sanctuary. What happened on September 11 in New York was literally IN New York; with walls echoing sounds like the Whispering Gallery in St. Paul's Cathedral. I could see the Twin Towers, their heads poking through the ceiling of New York, and I could hear sounds. Sounds unbearable.

Later, I spoke with a woman who witnessed nearly everything on September 11. She told me that she was in the shower of her 23rd floor apartment on Liberty (the southwest corner) when the first plane smashed into the North Tower. She confessed that that she didn't realize what was happening until she was drying herself off. She said she heard a roar of jet engines overhead (the second plane), and then, echoing throughout her house, the sound of thousands of people screaming. (I think I can hear that sound right now.) And I know it was one of the sounds I could still hear trembling in the faint murmurs of the buildings surrounding Ground Zero. The walls do speak. And they speak sorrowfully. (The woman, a Manhattan lawyer I fortuitously met on the train home, told me that she was never able to return to her apartment after closing the door to it just before the towers fell. It was essentially uninhabitable, at least for her. And she told me her entire harrowing story: the dust cloud filled with glass particles; the people screaming and pressing in the dark, the leaping into a boat on the Hudson, a thrown puppy, the vomiting, the uncertainty about more attacks, and so much more.)

But at the end of my too-short visit to Ground Zero, I could not shake from my mind the street sign, Church and Liberty. For Osama bin Laden attacked America - at least according to his own fatwa - because of its "Christian" infidelity (and its support and alliance with infidel Jews) and the liberty both synagogue and church provide. And it was America's liberties, our very freedoms, he turned against each of us: our freedom of travel, our easy borders, our freedom to build, and work in, tall buildings; our freedom to believe in God and liberty, or not. This is our vacant lot: that our virtues were turned against us by a man and men too impotent to build a nation, too weak to fill it with soldiers and weapons and wealth and commerce and hope; and too poor to attack us with something created by the superiority of their own vision. No, they attacked us with our own virtues, turned into weapons against us. They did not attack us with their virtues, but with their own spiteful vice. And for a moment, we staggered.

This morning, though far from New York, I still stand at the corner of Church and Liberty. I look up and understand: This is the World Trade Center. And I ask myself, "What world are you willing to trade?" My enemy has already asked that question, and he has shown me his answer. And now I give him mine: I am not trading.

Yesterday I walked through New York wearing a T-Shirt my wife gave to me two years ago. It reads on the front, in small print, "July 4, 1776: Remember Why." On the back, in quiet letters, it reads, "Live Free." I was amazed at how many people looked at my simple message as I passed through subway lines or strolled The Mall in Central Park. It is a good message.

Remember why.

Contratimes

©Bill Gnade 2005/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.

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