Yesterday the world stopped to remember a day that we still cannot get our brains around.
The very anticipation of the Tenth Anniversary of September 11 felt like a slow drumbeat to me.
It began in July, when I visited the site which is no longer called Ground Zero. I was invited in to hear strangers' stories, thanks to a program hosted by Facing History and Ourselves and the World Trade Center Tribute Center. When I arrived at the World Trade Center area I was struck by the intensity of thousands of people, moving in all different directions. People in business suits, and in shorts. Techies, tourists, teachers, analysts, lawyers, financial people, construction workers, security people, and lots of police trying to move human beings and traffic. It was a Tuesday. A beautiful Tuesday... just like... don't think like that.... I looked up. A new skyscraper was being built. I had no idea.
On that day in July I learned the power of the personal narrative. I shared mine, and got tears in my eyes as I heard others tell theirs.
Yesterday, when I watched the survivors' families reading the names of those lost I could not stop thinking that every one of the nearly three thousand lost souls has a story. Some of the readers shared tiny windows to their stories with the world yesterday. A little boy, nearly ten, had never met his father, and thanked him for loving him. A woman was still in so much pain she could barely pronounce her husband's name. A father lost his son and daughter-in-law... a whole generation gone.
Click here to see photos of the Memorial
People my age do not remember Pearl Harbor, and we are a little too young to have been felt the full impact of the weight of the assassinations of John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King. But we are the generation that will forever share this. I know that everyone goes through terrible life-changing crises ... a near death experience, an illness that leaves them changed or scarred, the loss of someone dear to them... but a catastrophe shared by so many on a such a deep level leaves a profound mark on a generation.
There is a movement to make September 11 a day of service. A mitzvah day. Will that keep the haters from hating? Of course not. Will that bring back the deceased? Nothing will, but I guess it will honor their memory a lot more than turning to hate. Every generation must become more loving, more compassionate, more tolerant than the one before it. That is the only path to peace. I know that not everyone feels that way. But it's the only way.
Give peace a chance.
No comments:
Post a Comment