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Woodbine Twiner/Logan Herald-Observer
September 7, 2011
9 II 10 YEARS LATER
A decade after the terror, in New York, at the Pentagon, at a field in Pennsylvania and in every nook and cranny of America, we move forward
S
C A R O LY N C O L E / L O S A N G E L E S T I M E S / M C T
uddenly, it has been 10 would build it a hundred and one. years. There is something of that in That’s an amazing real- human beings. Indeed, it may be ization when you rememsome of the best of what is in us. ber how it was back then. Call it stubbornness, call it Calendars still counted off days; resilience, call it faith, but we our eyes told us this. Clocks still always defy the random cruelties ticked off seconds; intellectually, of life, always dig ourselves out, we knew. But time — I would bury our dead, mourn our losses, have sworn this in a court of law rebuild, find a way to move for— did not move. ward. We did it when fire burned I remember, in those awful down Chicago, when an earthdays of aftermath, asking my colquake leveled San Francisco, league, Dave Barry, then the when broken levees drowned New Miami Herald’s humor columnist, Orleans. if he thought he would ever write And we did it when terror jokes again. “For the last astonished and devastated week,” he told me, “I us on Sept. 11. haven’t even tried to write Granted, we emerged anything funny, and for a from that crucible changed while I thought maybe I in ominous ways. We find never would, or should.” ourselves at war on three He had it; we all had it fronts, government more — that sense of being secretive and invasive than LEONARD stuck, unable to find your it has been in years. We PITTS JR. way back to the life you are running a prison McClatchy had lived before. I wrote beyond the reach of Newspapers 10 columns in a row habeas corpus on the about the horror I had seen, the island of Cuba. The government planes crashing, the lives lost, the may not let you fly and will not buildings melting, the people cov- tell you why. ered in dust. Finally, I had to Yes, Osama bin Laden is dead, force myself to write a column and experts tell us the terror about something else, had to force group he led is weakened and myself to care about something may soon follow. But terrorism that was not terror. That lasted itself remains alive and well, as one column. Then I went right does a fervent bigotry against back to what was now the norm. I Muslims that has seeped into the was all terror, all the time. mainstream of American political Now, somehow, that moment is thought where it exhibits itself a decade past. In measuring the with a shamelessness that once distance, perhaps it is enough to would have been unthinkable. note that today’s college freshman So there is reason to be conwas a third grader then. Thus do cerned at the place to which we the clock and the calendar do have moved. But, having felt their work. Thus do today’s terstuck inside a nightmare, I know rors become tomorrow’s memothere is also reason to be grateful ries. Thus does news become hiswe moved at all, that clock and tory. calendar did their work and that And I find myself rememberthere resides in us the stubborn ing how I used to torture ants as a resilience of ants. child, the happy hours I spent It felt as if we might never go flooding their nests with water, forward from that moment. But watching them grab their larvae we did. and run for safety. The thing that struck me, that earned my childLeonard Pitts Jr., winner of the ish wonder and respect, was that 2004 Pulitzer Prize for commenthey always came back. Destroy tary, is a columnist for the Miami their world a hundred times, they Herald.
New York NOW: Above, con-
struction continues on Freedom Tower, center, and the 9/11 Memorial and Museum at Ground Zero in New York in this May 2011 photo. Freedom Tower is expected to be completed by January 2014. Constuctution of the 9/11 Memorial and Museum is expected to be finished by September 2012. THEN: Left, a New York City firefighter looks at the ruins of the World Trade Center at dawn on Sept. 12, 2001, a day after the terrorist attacks.
Shanksville, Pa. NOW: Below, friends and
family still place tributes to loved ones lost on the fence overlooking the Flight 93 site in Shanksville, Pa., on July 31, 2011. Phase 1 of the permanent memorial is scheduled to open Sept. 11, 2011.
The Pentagon
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on horseback, patrol the crash site of Flight 93 in Shanksville, Pa., prior to a remembrance ceremony for the victims on Sept. 11, 2002.
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9/11 ANNIVERSARY — TIMELINE (PAGE 2 OF 8)