All of us are haunted by memories of that morning in September, 12 years ago. Our sense of geographic invulnerability imploded and our many worldviews were shredded into tatters. The World Trade Center towers collapsed and fell all the way through our solar plexus.
We struggled for a language to express our disbelief and despair, but on a molecular level we knew that the world for us had changed forever, and that those changes rolled through the decade as dramatically as the tsunami of acrid debris flooding the Manhattan streets around Ground Zero: ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the rise of the NSA surveillance state, the complete overhaul of air travel security, and a mindset that looked at the eastern horizon more as a point of attack than a celestial stage for each day’s sunrise.
Images from that day are embedded in our psyches. It’s easy to rebroadcast the din, dust, panic and blood of that morning, but that makes it harder to remember the many acts of compassion and courage that took place that morning.
We know about the extraordinary efforts and sacrifices of first responders, a few of the heroic acts of individuals helping each other inside the Towers, and the passenger revolt on Flight 93 over Pennsylvania.
While countless stories will remain unknown, here is a story that animates our spirit with more than hope. It gives us evidence of moral courage and the sense that right action is choiceless, selfless. It gives us the language we sought that morning 12 years ago.
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