2,977 people – 8:46 AM – 9:03 AM – 9:37 AM – 10:03 AM – The hours and minutes of a perfect September morning – much like today’s perfect weather as we remember the people lost ten years ago. I can hear the bells from churches, see the testimonials on TV and most of all remember, and except for Cable 12’s “enough, too much, too little” survey seeming to put a game show spin on it – nothing today was trivialized.
9/11 is like a scar from a grievous wound, it never goes away. After a while we get used to its presence, but it’s always there to remind you, with or without the testimonials, TV coverage and news. As we sit under the umbrella of yet more threats, warnings and orange alerts this week, we realize we’ve adjusted to living with the twisted minds and actions that are part of the fabric of the society we move in today.
I was lucky not to lose anyone that was a personal friend or member of my family, but I remember a lot of the people in the broker community I knew through my job, people I enjoyed talking to and sometimes saw walk through the halls of the offices where I worked. It was my job in the aftermath to find out who our new broker reps were and it was an odious job replacing the contact names in our rosters. There were so many names.
The day will stay with us, the falling of the first tower more vivid even than when the planes hit, that final sigh as it fell to its knees taking all that life with it. It stays there, like my mother-in-law telling me where she was when Pearl Harbor was attacked, or my 6th grade class when Mrs. Anderson told us to go home that November day in 1963, and the coverage – the caisson, the little boy’s salute and Jackie Kennedy’s iconic pink suit still as vivid in our memories as anything we saw on 9/11/01 and in the days that followed.
10 years have passed, we’ve grown, we’ve learned, perhaps hardened – and that’s our best answer, our best defense, our best weapon against this insanity – 10 years later we are still here, they didn’t win.
