I was living in Los Angeles on September 11, 2001. I remember my first visit back home to New York for Thanksgiving that year. My wife and I made the pilgrimage to pay our respects at Ground Zero -- at that point still very much the pile of rubble with the iconic twisted facade still jutting out.Posters of the missing were still all around -- the collages of faces of the dead. Even this seemed to be like something out of a movie, much like the falling towers and dust clouds which engulfed lower Manhattan looked like so many special effects.
I remember not wanting to look at any of it. Not wanting to see the faces on the poster board, or look at the dust knowing that indeed there was a certain variety of ash in that dirt on the shoe or store window.
But I did look at all of it.
I looked closely.
I took it all in, and I was hurting.
I was crying. Whimpering right there on Wall Street.
I was nauseous.
I felt it was the very least I could do, for while I personally knew one person who died that day, and grew up with the widow of a fallen FDNY hero, I lost no relatives. No loved ones.
Still, I felt it incumbent upon me, as an American, as a New Yorker, as a fellow child of God to feel some pain, to be at least somewhat uncomfortable. Again, the very least I could do.
Via: Fox News
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