It took 100 days for the fires at Ground Zero to finally subside.
Six years later, long after the last fires at the base of the World Trade Center have abated, the victims of the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history are remembered on the Internet.
"God bless Paul Talty and his family," reads a comment about a 40-year-old police officer who died at the WTC. "He was a really close friend to the family and my uncle’s best friend."
Some writers knew the victims in passing, while others were close friends. School children in foreign countries researching the attacks offer words of condolence, moved by the personal anecdotes that pepper the tribute sites.
"My fondest memory was when we would make sure to write these long notes to each other and pass it to one another in the hallway," one long-lost friend writes, recalling 23-year-old Laura Angilletta, a sales clerk who died in the WTC. "I probably would not have made it through junior high without her. She was the most caring, smart, considerate friend I had."
Reflecting the diversity of the victims, the comments aren’t relegated to English. There are passages in Spanish, a goodbye in Ukrainian. Some postings are in French and others in Japanese.
"I think of the Sept. 11 attacks often," one contributor writes in a German-language tribute to Michael Theodoridis, a 32-year-old consultant whose airliner collided with the North Tower of the WTC at 466 miles per hour. "And so you always live in our hearts."
Twenty-year-old Toshiya Kuge had only been in the U.S. for a few weeks. He spent April in Utah studying English as a foreign exchange student from Japan, and after a summer trip back to his homeland the American football fan returned stateside in late August to fulfill his dream of visiting Niagara Falls. He died returning to Japan from the East Coast, his flight nose-diving upside down into a field near Shanksville, Penn.
Sept. 11th is America’s story. The events of that day involved far more people than a cursory review of news reports might suggest. Recovery efforts in Shanksville alone were massive, taking three weeks and involving more than 1,000 people from over 70 organizations. Three hundred volunteers conducted a final sweep for airplane debris at the conclusion of the efforts.
But as years transpire the attacks of 9/11 become a fixed, static memory. The disaster itself is transformed into a singularity, a monolithic and ominous phrase that relegates the poignant and distinctly human details of the attacks to the dustbin of history while becoming a rallying point for countless political and social platforms.
The emergency responders, computer programmers, stock brokers, sous chefs, custodial workers and countless others that perished are swept aside and instead become mere cogs in never-ending political narratives.
The more intimate details and tragedies of 9/11 are thereby obfuscated and forgotten by an endless number of partisan ideologues, conspiracy theorists and policy makers.
We must instead learn from the losses suffered on Sept. 11, rather than employ it for gain. The grief experienced by innumerable friends and family members on that day provides us as Americans an unparalleled insight into the human condition. The attacks exposed to us a number of vulnerabilities, emotional and otherwise, that we once naively thought were beyond our consideration.
It is ultimately a directive telling us that human life is not only brilliant and unique, but that the loss of a life means the loss of a world – the killing of an innocent person is, as the Quran says, as if one had slain all mankind.
Recent arrests of would-be terrorists in Denmark and Germany reiterate the threat we face from al-Qaida and its fellow travelers. The capture of 250 Pakistani soldiers near the Afghan border further illustrates the power of such forces.
We must remain vigilant, but we must act judiciously and humanely in our actions – this is the greatest imperative we can derive from Sept. 11, so that never again will a fire smolder for 100 days in the heart of our nation’s largest city.
