It’s an early March morning in New York.
I’m standing on the corner of Vesey and Church streets in the shadow of a church that the travel guides tell me has seen a lot in its 200-plus-year history, but I’m more interested in the construction site across the street.
You can’t see into it from the street. There’s a plywood barrier that runs all the way around the huge perimeter and barbed wire lines the top, along with security cameras. I don’t see too many construction sites protected so heavily, but this isn’t an ordinary construction site.
I make my way through the crowd on the narrow sidewalk, and my gaze goes from the new skyscraper that’s slowly being integrated into the New York skyline to the sign in front of me that indicates the building’s future address: One World Trade Center.
No sudden air of melancholy comes over me as I fully begin to appreciate where I’m standing. I can only speak for myself, of course, because this isn’t my city.
I would imagine many people who live here avoid this place at all costs because the pain is unbearable, or it brings thoughts and feelings that are simply better left unfelt.
Ground zero is not a place to stand and be contemplative about the enormous loss that occurred here. It’s an incredibly busy area and if you stand even for a moment, you run the risk of getting swept up in the flow.
If you want to stand and reflect, you have to find a doorway, or you can go to one of the two 9/11 related museums that are nearby, but I’d rather not be standing next to a giant display of 9/11 mugs when I try to find my thoughts, though, regardless of if the proceeds go to charity.
It’s difficult to think in terms of heroes and sacrifice and 9/11 being The Day That the World Changed. I stand and look and I realize that this is a construction site that shouldn’t exist.
There should be two giant monoliths that make you lie on your back to see all the way to the top. There should be businessmen and women, mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, all hurrying to the next meeting or luncheon. There should be children visiting on field trips and even just saying hi to Daddy or Mommy at work. Instead, there are cranes, trucks, backhoes, bobcats, dirt…and two giant holes in the ground.
I stand where, 10 years ago, the air was thick with fire and smoke and dust and terror; where people ran, and their only goal was to get far away and stay alive. I’ve watched the footage countless times over the last decade.
I’ve convinced myself that when I got here, I could picture, and feel and be one with this place and these souls, and that for awhile at least, “9/11” would be more than the catchall for “change” that it’s become.
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It would be more than something that has been used as the backbone of more than one political action plan or slogan. It wouldn’t be about mosques, or building plans, or settlements. It would be the event that, to me, is only ever alluded to anymore, and rarely, if ever, honestly thought about. That “Never Forget” would ring true, and not hollow, as I think it’s become.
That doesn’t happen.
It’s impossible for me to picture the exodus up Broadway to what so many hoped would finally be safety. I can’t look up into the sky and visualize the horror and confront it and realize it as a part of our shared history.
I can’t connect the grieving wreck of a daughter that I saw giving her father’s name to a CBS cameraman with little hope that he’d be found, to the place in front of me.
I can’t conceive of the fact that when what used to stand here came down in a shower of rubble, there were children that lost one or even both of their parents.
I can’t shake the abstract thought that “this is where 9/11 happened.”
I started writing this after I read a column by Diane Dimond. She wrote that the coverage this weekend would be too much. That she would commemorate it in her own way and not turn on the television.
Her column is no doubt from her heart, and I see her point because, at the time, she was a New Yorker. I’m not speaking for anyone who lost someone on that terrible day or anyone who was personally affected.
I’m speaking for myself — someone who went to ground zero and couldn’t shake the thought that it was no more than a dot on a map of “places to see in NYC.” I’m speaking for the vast majority I’m sure is out there, that for whom “self-reflection” is a cop-out and a chance to ignore the whole thing all together.
I may be incredibly cynical, but I think we should watch as much of the 9/11 coverage this weekend as we can, because we need to see the horror and be confronted with it again to realize that it actually happened.
Those who weren’t born yet need to realize that not only was this a major sociopolitical event, but at its most basic, it was a day in America when we realized that sometimes, costs are enormous, and good people do not always win.
We live in a world that does its best to eliminate and hide everything that we might find unpleasant and everything that makes us squeamish or might offend our delicate sensibilities. Each of us should do his or her best to relive that day and reflect over what it really meant, for the world and for himself or herself, and maybe in order to do that, we need to see the planes and the fire and the smoke.
We need to truly remember.
That’s the only way we’ll never forget.
