Posted on 09/02/2006 1:47:04 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
Five years. Is it enough time to begin moving on? A widow's bed still feels empty, but she can balance the checkbook. She can function without him. In some ways.
Is it enough time for the physical scars to mend? A crater remains where the towers soared, but the hum of construction promises new life, one day, in the void.
Time heals, or so the saying goes. But when the hurt is so great, so unlike anything we've ever known, how much time does it take? And how much change does that time bring, to us as a nation and individuals?
Security. Freedoms. Regular people finding their way in a world transformed by one terrible day.
Five years have passed. What difference has it made for us all?
Every day the past and the present collide in Barbara Minervino's life – in a household chore, in other ordinary acts, in a stranger's question.
“Are you divorced?”
On a cruise, a rare escape, another passenger wonders why there's no man by her side.
“No, I'm a widow,” she replies.
“Oh ... heart attack?”
Then Minervino has to decide, yet again, whether to explain that her husband Louis was murdered by terrorists in tower one of the World Trade Center a few weeks shy of his 55th birthday.
At home, she balances the checkbook, changes the light bulbs, determines which night the trash goes out on the curb. But she remembers how Lou once took care of those things, how she relished being his protected princess in their 25 years of marriage.
She crawls into bed, alone, but still reflexively fumbles for his hand in the dark. They used to fall asleep holding hands, but now all she feels is the night air.
“I'm here. I'm alive,” she says at her home in Middletown, N.J. “But if you ask me if I'm living, I'm not quite sure about that because there were two parts, and he's the other part that I'm missing.”
On Sept. 21, 2001, Minervino and her two daughters held a memorial for Lou, although the family had nothing to bury.
On Sept. 6, 2002, the New York City medical examiner's office called to report a fragment of Lou's right shoulder had been found. It would be another year before Minervino could bring herself to bury it.
Whether time can completely restore her faith is another matter. A devout Roman Catholic, Minervino consulted a priest in her endless quest to find a way to forgive. Then he suggested that if God had absolved the terrorists, they could be in Heaven right alongside her husband.
That made it impossible, for a while, for Minervino to recite the Lord's Prayer. She simply couldn't utter the passage, “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
Minervino has learned how to go on. But really moving on? That's not so easy. Her mind says forgive; her heart screams don't. Her mind accepts that Lou's gone; her heart wants to keep him alive. “I still feel very much a part of a pair,” she says.
Perhaps that's why sometimes, in bed, she stretches her hand into the space beside her. Not by accident, but on purpose. And she imagines Lou can somehow hear when she whispers, “You can hold it.”
For a long time, the first year maybe, ground zero still felt like Esther Regelson's Main Street.
She could picture the coffee shop where she and her boyfriend fed the sparrows. The Amish produce market where she shopped. The place she bought lottery tickets. The book store.
She lived two blocks from the World Trade Center for 23 years. The stores at the bottom of the twin towers were her haunts, as comforting as home itself.
On Sept. 11, the second jumbo jet to fly into the towers went right over her apartment building. She and her two cats were boated to New Jersey.
When she returned six months later, ground zero was closed off by police barriers while it was cleaned of debris and bodies, then guarded by a metal mesh fence while the prolonged battle over what to build there and who would pay for it played out.
Now, what Regelson calls “the Grand Canyon” and “the big hole” is as much a part of the neighborhood as the tall buildings and the Amish market were. Work has begun on a memorial and a skyscraper that will extend 1,776 feet into the sky. The height evokes the year of America's independence, and the structure has been christened the Freedom Tower.
Construction is occurring 70 feet below ground – heard but not often seen.
“I can't even picture anything else there right now,” Regelson says. “It's so become part of my subconscious.”
While she waits for something to emerge from the hole, the tiniest glimmers of her past have returned.
She calls them red-letter days. The day her hallway was cleaned of the white dust that congealed into stringy shreds in her hands and caked everything she owned. The day the electricity came back on. The reopening last year of a restaurant across the street that she never favored – until it disappeared.
The big hole has gouged a permanent chasm in the quality of her life. But she can't afford to move and really doesn't want to. She was devastated last month by word that a developer's plans to build market-rate condos could force her out.
“I keep things. I keep this neighborhood as my history,” she says as the tears come and don't stop outside a new Starbucks that opened a block from her home this May on her 47th birthday, another red-letter day.
“It's my neighborhood, and I knew it when.”
“That look like smoke?”
Jim Greene is pointing to a grayish wisp hanging above a nearby mountain. It's the height of fire season, and Greene has been busy clearing brush, thinning trees and moving wood piles around his cabin in the woods near Anaconda, Mont.
Greene calls this “risk management.” He knows a little something about risk management.
For three decades Greene worked for the state of Montana, first helping to protect forests against the threat of wildfires and then heading up the state's emergency management division – preparing for whatever risk Montanans might face: fire, floods, earthquakes.
Then came 9/11, and concerns about natural disasters were overshadowed by the possibility of bombings and bioterrorism – even here, 2,300 miles from ground zero.
Greene was on call 24 hours a day, often reacting to rumors. Legislators would ask him: “What do you think the terrorism threat is?” But because, even after 9/11, Greene wasn't privy to all available intelligence, he was never entirely sure how to answer.
The stress, in part, drove him to retire in 2003. He spends time at his cabin and fishing in Mexico, but risk management remains a priority. He trains first responders in mock disaster scenarios. And, this year, he was one of dozens of peer reviewers who analyzed states' disaster plans for a Department of Homeland Security study.
The question he tends to get nowadays: Are we, really, any safer? There's no clear answer to that one, either.
He visited five states and three U.S. territories as a homeland security reviewer. “They were prepared for the types of disasters that they were used to having,” he says. “They weren't prepared for something that has never occurred in their lifetime.”
There's been progress: Tighter security at airports. More training for emergency workers. Broadened knowledge of biological agents. But Hurricane Katrina showed how ill-prepared the nation remains in responding to widespread catastrophe, while the London airline bombing plot showcased shortcomings in airport screening.
Citizens think more about being prepared, Greene knows firsthand. Many augmented first-aid kits with canned food and bottled water. Folks are more wary on planes, in crowds. When Greene himself steps on a subway in Washington, D.C., he considers: What would I do if someone started shooting or set off a bomb or released sarin gas?
Once paranoid, perhaps, these thoughts are now part of the American psyche.
The grayish wisp, it turns out, was only a cloud. But Greene kept an eye on it until he was convinced.
Peter Chase sits behind his desk, his life before and after 9/11 on display all around him.
There is the picture of the carousel where he worked his first job as an amusement attendant. The red, white and blue banner that welcomed patrons a few years ago to the newly renovated public library he now oversees in Plainville, Conn.
Then there's the cartoon depicting a lineup of librarians under interrogation, and a poster that warns:
“Shhhhh! Keep silent while we rifle through your personal records.”
A soft-spoken man in shirt sleeves and striped tie, Chase once defended the right of libraries to stock a racy Madonna book. It was, at the time, one of the biggest controversies of his career. Then came the Patriot Act, an FBI demand for library records as part of a terrorism probe and the fight that turned Chase into a champion of American ideals.
“I never expected to be called on to defend the Constitution,” he says.
The debate over the delicate balance between maintaining civil liberties and fighting terrorism has only intensified in the years since Sept. 11, with details still coming to light about secret programs conducted in the name of national security.
This year words like “warrantless wiretapping” became part of the nation's lexicon. Civil rights activists called for investigations into reports that phone companies had forked over records of ordinary citizens' calls for a National Security Agency database.
And Chase was revealed as one of several “John Does” in a constitutional fight challenging the government's power to demand library records without a court order. The FBI directive prohibited Chase from acknowledging any role in the matter. He could tell his wife only that he was involved in a secret case. He promised his son that he didn't “expect” to be arrested.
The case ended in June after authorities discounted the threat they were investigating.
But Chase sees the world through newly cynical eyes. When he learned the government had been listening to international phone calls without warrants, he wondered if his own calls had been monitored. “We have to swing much more back in the direction of freedom and open government and trust in democracy,” says the librarian who has found his true calling. “We are far too secretive.”
The three women – as average as any of us – live in a pretty suburb of Phoenix, work together each week at the Y.
The mother who helps run the children's playroom.
The young wife who teaches kickboxing.
The retired flight attendant who works the front desk.
Hiba Elmoumou wears a head cover along with her candy-apple red “YMCA Staff” T-shirt. It brings questions, like those from a woman following a workout one day. “Are you Muslim? What do you believe in?”
In today's changed world, Elmoumou's religious identity has made her a teacher – every conversation a chance to instill knowledge.
“It's a way to show not all people are alike. Not all Muslims are terrorists.”
Outside at the swimming pool, little Sierra Crider scurries from a bug.
“Jump to Mommy. I'll protect you,” a woman shouts from the water. “Jump to Mommy. Let me protect you.”
Nikki Crider, the kickboxer, is all about protecting her daughter.
Before Sept. 11, Crider was a buoyant bride-to-be, planning a wedding and a new life. After, she grew obsessed with news programs about the attacks, cried when baseball fans belted out “America the Beautiful” – and she and her new husband reconsidered their dreams of having kids.
“What's going to happen when our child is an adult?” they wondered. “What kind of world will it be?”
Then came Sierra, now 2½. “A blessing,” Crider says, though time has done little to assuage her fears for her child's future. Already, she envisions the day when Mommy will have to explain words like “terrorism” and “9/11.”
“I just hope I don't have many things to explain to her when she gets old enough to ask.”
At the front desk, Lynn Robbins scans membership cards with a smile. Serving people is her calling, the reason she became a United Airlines flight attendant in 1969 and remained a dedicated employee for 33 years.
“We were called 'The Friendly Skies,'” she says, “and I really tried to be that flight attendant.”
After United 93 went down in a Pennsylvania field, she couldn't be that anymore. She viewed her passengers as the enemy. She put the FBI on her cell phone speed dial. In 2002, she retired.
The simple joy of meeting new people. Being able to mean it when she says, “Good afternoon.” Smiling without suspicion. Those things, Robbins has regained. But one thing is forever lost – for her and for us as a nation.
“Maybe we were all ignorant that this type of hatred exists in our world today – and continues,” she says. “That naive innocence that we all had. We'll never recapture that.”
Contributing to this story were Wayne Parry from Middletown, N.J.; Amy Westfeldt from New York City; John MacDonald from Anaconda, Mont.; and John Christoffersen from Plainville, Conn. Arrillaga reported from Ahwatukee, Ariz.
Sept. 11: Terrorists hijack four jetliners and crash them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field. The twin towers and Seven World Trade Center collapse.
Sept. 13: Osama bin Laden identified as prime suspect in the attack.
Sept. 14: Nineteen hijackers identified and linked directly to bin Laden.
Sept. 17: Wall Street trading resumes, ending stock market's longest shutdown since the Great Depression. Dow loses 684.81 points, its worst-ever one-day point drop.
Oct. 7: First airstrikes launched in Afghanistan. Bin Laden, in videotaped message, praises God for Sept. 11 attacks.
Oct. 26: President Bush signs anti-terrorism bill giving police unprecedented ability to search, seize, detain and eavesdrop in pursuit of possible terrorists.
Nov. 25: First wave of Marines lands near Taliban stronghold of Kandahar.
Dec. 22: Hamid Karzai and his transitional government sworn in to lead Afghanistan.
2002
Feb. 14: Leaders of House and Senate intelligence committees announce joint inquiry of intelligence community's failure to prevent the attacks.
Sept. 18: Investigator for joint inquiry testifies that intelligence agencies disregarded many warnings that terrorists might use planes as bombs.
Nov. 25: Bush signs legislation creating Department of Homeland Security.
Nov. 27: Bush signs bill establishing independent commission to investigate the Sept. 11 attacks.
Dec. 11: Congressional inquiry issues final report on intelligence failures leading up to terrorist attacks. Key recommendations include creating Cabinet-level director of national intelligence.
Dec. 13: WTC death toll drops to 2,792, one of several drops since the first anniversary of the attacks.
2003
Jan. 1: Thousands of newly hired government workers begin screening every checked bag at the nation's commercial airports for explosives.
Jan. 27: The independent 9/11 commission, headed by ex-New Jersey Gov. Thomas H. Kean, launches its 16-month investigation.
Feb. 19: Moroccan student Mounir el Motassadeq receives the maximum 15-year sentence in Germany for helping Sept. 11 hijackers. It was the first conviction tied to the terror plot and was later overturned. Motassadeq was subsequently convicted of belonging to a terrorist organization and sentenced to seven years. He was acquitted of more than 3,000 counts of being an accessory to murder. He is released from prison in February 2006 when a German federal court rules he shouldn't be jailed with appeals still pending. A hearing on his appeal is scheduled for Oct. 12.
Feb. 27: Architect Daniel Libeskind's Freedom Tower plan, including a 1,776-foot spire and sunken memorial, chosen for rebuilding trade center.
March 3: Design announced for Pentagon memorial, with 184 benches – each placed over an individual reflecting pool – inscribed with a victim's name.
March 31-April 1: The 9/11 commission holds first public hearings, a half mile from ground zero.
May 7: Federal investigators report that fireproofing on the WTC's steel floor supports was never tested and might not have met city building code.
Aug. 28: The Port Authority releases 2,000 pages of transcripts from emergency calls and radio transmissions following attacks.
Nov. 6: Firehouse across from World Trade Center re-opens.
2004
Jan. 23: The New York City Medical Examiner places final death toll from trade center attacks at 2,749.
June 16-17: 9/11 Commission concludes 20 months of investigation with a preliminary report that fails to find “credible evidence” of collaboration between Iraq and al-Qaeda on attacks.
July 22: 9/11 Commission delivers final report to President Bush; its key findings include the failure of the Bush and Clinton administrations to make anti-terrorism a top priority.
Dec. 17: Bush signs Intelligence Reform Act, a historic overhaul of the national intelligence system.
2005
March 24: Court ruling orders New York and its Fire Department to release tapes and transcripts of post-attack interviews with city firefighters, along with 911 calls from department personnel. Nearly nine hours of edited transcripts and recordings were released in March 2006.
April 22: Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person indicted in the U.S. for the attacks, pleads guilty to conspiring with the Sept. 11 hijackers. He is sentenced to six life terms to run as two consecutive life sentences in May 2006.
July 25: Former 9/11 Commission members give government “mixed grade” in following through on the panel's year-old recommendations.
Sept. 7: A design is chosen for the Flight 93 National Memorial in Pennsylvania. The design pays tribute to the heroic struggle by passengers who thwarted an attack on the nation's capital.
Sept. 26: Syrian-born businessman Imad Yarkas is sentenced in Spain to 27 years in prison after being convicted of leading an al-Qaeda cell and conspiring to commit murder in the Sept. 11 attacks. A second man, Ghasoub al-Abrash Ghalyoun, is convicted of collaborating with a terrorist group in the same trial.
2006
Jan. 9: The Dow Jones industrial average closes above 11,000 for the first time since before the attacks.
March 28: Officials say construction workers near the World Trade Center site had recently discovered more bone fragments and human remains. In September 2005, fragments had been found on the roof of the former Deutsche Bank building.
May 16: The Pentagon releases the first video images of American Airlines Flight 77 crashing into the military headquarters.
May 23: Opening of 7 World Trade Center, the third building to fall on Sept. 11 and the first to be rebuilt.
July 31: NATO troops take command of military operations in southern Afghanistan from the U.S.-led coalition.
Compiled by Associated Press researcher Judy Ausuebel.
5 years out and the sympathy I once felt for the palestinians has long since hardened into a rock solid support of Israel and America.
Some of us have changed. Others of us have turned into Frenchmen. As Karl Rove so aptly put it: "Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war. Liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers."
I never thought after 9-11 that Democrats would put cheap partisan political gain over the need to pull together as a nation to fight the people who attacked us WHEREVER THEY ARE AND HOWEVER WE NEED. Five years on, we have a nation ready to punish the president and his party for merely taking a pro-active stand in fighting terrorism, including in Iraq which worked with Al Qaeda under Saddam's regime and trained and supported terrorists throughout the world.
Never did I think in a time of national danger we'd have the opposition party actively trying to divide the nation and to undermine its commander in chief because they care more about raw power politics than actually seeing due diligence done in the effort to bring down Al Qaeda. May everlasting shame be sealed upon their heads forever for their perfidy and dishonor.
bingo, i once too felt some pityfor palestinians, now, none.
Good post Mike. According to the "polls," 52% of us who promised not to forget have already forgotten and have gone back to mudslinging and attack politics as usual. And they blame President Bush for dividing America.
When the Sept. 11th attacks occurred, I figured our nation would stay united for about two months. I was wrong. The harping from the left started in less than a week. I remain quite pessimistic that we will be able to win this war. This MTV generation just doesn't have the attention span to fight a protracted war, which is what this one is going to be. The brave soldiers of that generation excluded of course.
9/11 was Pearl Harbor, history repeating itself. In vietnam we had a ship attacked off the coast. Now, which model will prevail here : WWII or vietnam? That's the basic question underlying this election : stand tall with the president or cut and run like the spanish did with the yellow stripe down their back? Does america have the SPINE to be a world superpower?
No truer words have ever been posted or written. I struggle each day to fathom why the apoligists in our nation cannot see what the rest of us have come to know: That evil exists and flourishes when good men do nothing. While I hold no power and have no access to oppose these Ill-Liberal idiots, I have, and will continue to send emails to them to challenge their lunacy. As my son fights in Iraq, soon to be joined by two of his nephews, I will fight against those who wish to support our enemies.
Count on it.
I never thought after 9-11 that Democrats would put cheap partisan political gain over the need to pull together as a nation to fight the people who attacked us WHEREVER THEY ARE AND HOWEVER WE NEED.
As I recall that attitude lasted about two weeks. And by the end of the year it was a distant memory.
For some of us it's still fresh. For me Sept. 11th will always be a day for sober reflection. It's the new Pearl Harbor day.
That is the power you have. It's something we can all do talk to familiy members, friends, co-workers. It's the one thing we can do, even if you're a 58 year old skinny guy.
I agree, though I'm not 58 and I haven't been skinny for a long time.
I'm not skinny either. I an however trim...slender...svelte, but not SKINNY! :-)
Well, I used to be trim. 26 years of marriage changed all that. Boy, my wife can cook. I'm trying to get back into some semblance of health. I did lose about 50 lbs, and kept it off for around three years before having a bit of a relaps. Putting it on was easy; taking it back off not so much. But, in case this war comes to our back yard I am going to work hard to be physically ready.
Good job SoldierDad. And pass along my thanks and godspeed to your son and nephews. I will be praying God's protection and grace upon them and all our soldiers.
As someone of the "MTV generation", I think that you underestimate our generation.
I, for one, would love to see more leadership from my generation in the House and Senate. Vietnam wasn't my war, but the WOT is. However, until some of these older politicans die or retire, it's going to a rehash of the 1960's. Different day-same arguments.
I would prefer to die standing rather than kneeling.
But I will not choose life as a slave..
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