Posted on 09/06/2003 1:45:49 AM PDT by jriemer
It’s 4:46am September 6.
Its a little more than 100 hours from the Second Anniversary of Start the World Trade Center Attack and the subsequent Strike on the Pentagon and the Crash in Pennsylvania. 100 hours seems to be a long time; however, it is barely enough to reflect and remember all those who perished on the ground and in the air. Each one of the victims has a story, a life, that if retold would take more than 100 hours to appreciate the richness of their stay on this earth before it was snatched away.
Since 911, there has been more sacrifice. More have taken from this earth – this time not in tragedy but in a quest for justice and the expansion of freedom. They were not helpless victims but Heroes of liberation for the Afghanis and Iraqis and protectors of our domestic security.
We would hope that you would take the time and reflect on the lives of those who died on 9-11 and those who have sacrificed their all since that day in these next 100 hours. Please contribute a post of reflection, a prayer, a memorial, a picture or even just a ping to your friends to let them know that 9-11 has not been ignored this year.
Never forget…
Now let's hunt these bastards down where ever they hide and exterminate them. No negotiations, No reasoning, No prisoners. Just dead.
"200 years from now, I want their children's children's children's children to cower and cringe in fear whenever they hear the sounds of jet engines overhead because their legends tell of fire from the sky.
I want them to hide in dark caves and holes in the earth, shivering with terror whenever they hear the roar of diesel engines because the tales of their ancestors talk about metal monsters crawling over the earth, spitting death and destruction.
I want their mothers to be able to admonish them with "If you don't behave, the Pale Destroyers will come for you", and that will be enough to reduce them to quivering obesience.
I want the annihilation to be so complete that their mythology will tell them of the day of judgment when the stern gods from across the sea .. the powerful 'Mericans .. destroyed their forefathers' wickedness."
Remember this oldie but goodie? Thanks Hijinx
A moment of silence at Bagram (sp) Airbase Afghanistan
Flight 93 Heroes
Christian Adams
37 years old, Biebelsheim, Germany
Lorraine G. Bay
Hightstown, New Jersey
Todd Beamer
32 years old, Cranbury, New Jersey.
Alan Beaven
48 years old, Oakland, California
Mark Bingham
31 years old, San Francisco, California.
Deora Bodley
20 years old, Santa Clara, California
Sandra W. Bradshaw
38 years old, Greensboro, North Carolina
Marion Britton
53 years old, Census Bureau Employee
Thomas E. Burnett Jr.
38 years old, San Ramon, California.
William Cashman
60 years old
Georgine Rose Corrigan
Patricia Cushing
69 years old, of Bayonne, New Jersey, a retiree
Jason Dahl
The captain of United Flight 93.
Joseph Deluca
Patrick Driscoll
Edward Felt
41 years old, Matawan, New Jersey
Colleen Fraser
51 years old, Elizabeth, New Jersey
Andrew Garcia
62 years old, Portola Valley, California
Jeremy Glick
31 years old, West Milford, New Jersey
Kristin Gould
Lauren Grandcolas
38 years old, San Rafael, California
Wanda A. Green
more 49 years old, Linden, New Jersey
Donald F. Greene
52 years old, Greenwich, Connecticut
Linda Gronlund
46 years old, Warwick, New York
Richard Guadagno
38 years old, Eureka, California
Leroy Homer
36 years old, Marlton, New Jersey (co-pilot)
Toshiya Kuge
20 years old, Tokyo, Japan
CeeCee Lyles
Fort Myers, Florida (flight attendant)
Hilda Marcin
79 years old, Budd Lake, New Jersey
Waleska Martinez
37 years old
Nicole Miller
21 years old, San Jose, California
Louis J. Nacke
42 years old, New Hope, Pennsylvania
Donald A. Peterson
66 years old, Spring Lake, New Jersey
Jean Hoadley Peterson
55 years old, Spring Lake, New Jersey
Mark (Mickey) Rothenberg
Scotch Plains, New Jersey
Christine Snyder
32 years old, Kailua, Hawaii
John Talignani
72 years old, Staten Island, New York
Honor Elizabeth Wainio
27 years old, Watchung, New Jersey
Deborah Welsh
49 years old, New York, New York
Rest in peace, brave warriors.
9-11 Memorial at US Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan (9-11-02)
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SHANKSVILLE, Pa. - The wind drives horizontal sleet across the Laurel Mountains on the edge of a filled-in strip mine. Rosary beads dangle from nails on a seven-foot crucifix planted in the ground. Suspended in the frigid air by 30-m.p.h. gusts, tiny crosses twist and black beads flutter, part of a makeshift memorial created by strangers and locals.
There were four planes on Sept. 11. You can forget that sometimes. The last one came down 500 yards from here, at the Diamond T Coal Co., whose black dirt absorbed United Flight 93, the machine and the people, in a crash that linked this remote hamlet to an agitated, dangerous world. It hit upside down, says Paula Pluta, who was distracted that day from eating toast and watching Little House on the Prairie by a roaring silver streak that fell an eighth of a mile outside her picture window.
There was no plane when Pluta got there moments later - just a 50-foot crater and some sawed-off pine trees. This was the flight of fighters, the ones who thwarted Osama's robots. After phoning their loved ones to say goodbye, the weightlifter and the quarterback, the rugby player, the woman with the brown belt in karate, and the other passengers conceived a counterterrorist plot in economy class.
Todd Beamer recited the 23d Psalm, then said, "Let's roll," and maybe the Capitol or the White House was spared. Here in tiny, worn Shanksville, decorated for Christmas and still bedecked in red, white and blue, many of the 245 residents are grateful. "People here look at the people on the plane as heroes who saved the lives of this town," says Glenn Kashurba, a local psychiatrist.
Everywhere in these parts, 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, it's the same. People tell me that if the plane had continued on its trajectory for three more seconds, it would have hit the schoolhouse, where 500 kids, K through 12, were sitting that morning about a mile away. "To think we'd have lost all the youth of our area," Wendy Stemple says. "The parents here are appreciative of the passengers." Of course, the plane could have hit anywhere, and no one knows whether the passengers - one of whom was a pilot - actually took control and directed the Boeing 757 into an empty field.
But this idea about the school's salvation is locked into people's heads and is part of how residents view Sept. 11. It's added to the local sense of custodianship of the dead fliers. "We're the caretakers now," says Barbara Black, curator for the Historical and Genealogical Society of Somerset County. "It's like they're part of us now," says Judy Baeckel, who runs the post office. "You worry about what'll happen to them. We have to take care of things here, their [permanent] memorial."
A sign left by a resident at the temporary memorial explains the thinking: "God put this plane . . . [here] because He knew this community could take care of it." The bureaucrat with the lowest budget in Somerset County, coroner Wally Miller, has been doing his part. On Dec. 14, he and a military DNA lab identified a final set of remains, which belongs to one of the 40 passengers and crew members whose name he won't release. Miller has been the main contact with the families. He has collected remains, often alone. He's not a doctor; he's a funeral-home director who got his wife to lend him a hand.
Before Sept. 11, the toughest case Miller had had was a car wreck. He'll give the remains to the families by February. There will still be ashes left at the site, though, and perhaps even remains that could not be identified. Lots of people in and around town ask Miller about the four hijackers' remains. Although they'll be given to the FBI, it's possible that particles of the men's remains will be forever intermingled with the unidentified remains of the passengers and crew. It's distressing, people tell me, a sacrilege. But it's something they're willing to live with, as long as some kind of memorial is made here.
People from the National Park Service, Oklahoma City and the county were in town Dec. 9, talking about what the residents will face: a years-long, undoubtedly contentious process. Already, Shanksville citizens whisper to me, they're starting to feel edged out of decision-making about the memorial. Unfortunately, politics supplant emotions every time. What these people want may not come to pass. It'll be a while before anything significant is done on the memorial, though.
Meantime, Kashurba says, "People will try to find a new normality. But there's really no ending, really no closure." I understand that. For this series of weekly essays I've searched for a meaning, for a final lesson from Sept. 11. I've spoken with dozens of people to find it. Invariably, they tell me the same thing: They now know life is short and fragile, and that there's no time to waste. Cliches, to be sure, but maybe some people have realized epiphanies that have altered their life courses. I vowed I'd never again sweat the small stuff in life.
Well, soon enough I was complaining to a waiter about cold potatoes, then kvetching about the sins of my satellite TV company. Maybe you, too, were whining and stressing over nothing a lot sooner than you thought. Human nature does not change just like that. With the horrific events of Sept. 11, irony did not die, as some overwrought magazine writer famously declared. Boorishness continues, giddiness goes on. People have shopped, made love, cleaned their kitchens, screamed at their kids. I'd like to think I would have just eaten the cold potatoes. But I didn't.
While we may not be permanently altered, we certainly saw and did things never seen or done before. We demonstrated astonishing generosity, offering up more than $1 billion to help the victims' families. We showed profound ugliness, turning on dark-skinned men in shameful attempts to make ourselves feel better. Willie Nelson and Sylvester Stallone shared the stage at a benefit concert, which has to be some kind of first. And ersatz hoods from The Sopranos showed up at ground zero on bicycles to help out.
We gained new respect for firefighters and cops, although I question the sincerity of some people's instant love for guys with badges. For the record, I saw motorists on the Pennsylvania Turnpike still thwarting the highway patrol, flashing their headlights to alert oncoming motorists that smokies lay in wait to slap them with tickets.
While I may not be permanently altered, there is sadness I can't purge. I will live with the everlasting regret of not having kept in closer touch with my friend Billy, who died at the World Trade Center. Four hundred people attended his memorial service, the bald mensch with a weightlifter's body and a child's sense of fun. "We go on," the rabbi said.
Since the 11th, I've been calling my brother more. He lives three blocks from ground zero and lost 300 colleagues from his firm. Two weeks after the attacks, after the power was restored and he was allowed back into his building, I helped clean out his freezer. I tossed a stinking turkey and some of my mother's leftover pasta.
Chris cranked an Allman Brothers CD loud over the cemetery quiet of Battery Park City, determined to let people know somebody still lived there. Because he's been through so much, I ask him what the lesson of Sept. 11 is. "They can get you wherever you are," he says without hesitating. His understandable paranoia is depressing. But he reminds me of the truest thing I was told in weeks of conversations with people about Sept. 11: "We are all tied into the whole thing," said Evangeline Bannister, a Philadelphia laundry worker who lost her job as a result of the terrorist attacks. Certainly they know that now in these mountains, whose rocky remoteness was supposed to protect Western Pennsylvanians from the troubles of this world. "We can no longer tell our kids these large-scale events don't happen here," Kashurba says.
I contemplate the psychiatrist's words as I watch three children wrestling with cellos nearly twice their size in a hotel parking lot in nearby Somerset. Their Christmas concert finished, the kids lug their instruments and talk excitedly about school vacation. This holiday has caught people here off guard. "We lost time," Kashurba says. "We lost the fall." Suddenly, it's Christmas in a place fixated on a late summer morning. But it's not too late for Shanksville. It's seen the worst of what people can do and has kept going.
My brother said something else from his one-bedroom on the lip of ground zero: "I've been amazed at people's resiliency. You can get through things. You can live through bad things." They're doing that today in Shanksville, in Washington, in Manhattan. Holding together, and moving on. When all is said and done, that's a lesson to take from Sept. 11.
European Union
Munich, Germany
Minsk, Belarus
Jacques Chirac, President, France
Palestinians in East Jerusalem
Palestine school
Prague, Czech Republic
London, UK
Pristina, Kosovo
Zagreb, Croatia
Sweden
Berlin Embassy
Berlin schools
Moscow, Russia - Embassy
Outside U.S. Embassy in Berlin
Outside U.S. Embassy in Berlin
Sydney, Australia
Prague, Czech Republic
U.S. Embassy in Stockholm, Sweden
I5, Östersund, Sweden
U.S. Embassy in Warsaw, Poland
Youth in Tirana, Albania
U.S. Embassy in Moscow, Russia
Oslo, Norway
Iwojima, and flag at wreckage
The Kremlin
U.S. Embassy, Tel Aviv
U.S. Embassy, Tokyo, Japan
Oslo, Norway
United States consulate in Hamburg, Germany
Moscow
Town hall, Copenhagen, Denmark
Outside U.S. Embassy in Denmark
Berlin
Berlin
Berlin
U.S. Capitol building
Chile
Dresden, Germany
Jerusalem
London
Muslim
South Africa
Wolfsburg, Germany
Canada
People signing a book of condolence in Cardiff, Wales
New Zealand
Norway
Norway
Norway
Norway
Rome, Italy
Germany
Frankfurt, Germany
Ottawa, Canada
Headquarters of the Allied Forces, Maisieres, Belgium
Warsaw, Poland
Lima, Peru
Brasilia, Brasil
St. Petersburg, Russia
Brussel
School in Korea
Sgt. Daniel K. Methvin, 22, Belton, Texas, July 16, 2003, Iraq.
Rest in peace, Daniel.
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