We saw a photo recently. It was a picture of a young boy on a tourist ferry in New York. The sun was shining. There were smiles. The waves sparkled. The scenic backdrop was the cluster of gray and white and glass-covered buildings that made up the city’s skyline, with the World Trade Center towers prominently included.
The boy is much older and the towers are long gone. We are changed, forever altered in our posture toward the world around us and the world in general.
Today, many will stop short in their thoughts and remember that day. For those old enough, those panicked “where-were-you” moments start to add up. The assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the Challenger explosion, Sept. 11, 2001. Each of us has their own list.
They are times when the world is an especially vulnerable place, when events take us out of ourselves and we become joined in that moment in time with the people around us and across the country and sometimes the world.
Covid may become one of those moments, although that moment will become a ring, like those in the grain of a great oak. Someone looking at our covid ring would, however, see how un-unified we are.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
But things were different then. For a brief moment in time, we as a nation were as one. We had been struck by a foe that was supposed to be across the oceans and many time zones away. And yet, the smoke rose that morning, and the planes kept crashing, and we sat stunned.
That is perhaps the biggest difference in being old enough to have witnessed the chaos. Those people felt the moment, while today’s college or high school student can only learn about it like so much other history we absorb. Eventually, as time passes, that is what all history becomes, something carried on videos and online sites and in the pages of books.
We still mourn for those lost that day. In all, almost 3,000 people lost their lives. We mourn for the heroes, the firefighters and paramedics and police officers who rushed to the scene to help, only to be consumed by the ordeal.
And who can forget the story of heroism by those on Flight 93? The words “Let’s roll” spoke volumes as these mostly unarmed passengers refused to let the four suicide-mission hijackers fly their plane into the White House, which was their likely target.
There will be anniversary memorials all across the country today. Pine Bluff has its own. Each year, the Pine Bluff Fire Department, in a subdued manner, calls everyone out to the front of their respective stations, and they all have a minute of silence. Sometimes someone makes a remark. Sometimes there is just silence, as if there are no words available for that solemn moment.
Fire Chief Shauwn Howell likes the simplicity of the anniversary marker, saying that he wants everyone to remember the ultimate sacrifice made by hundreds of firefighters in New York. Some of Howell’s firefighters might not be old enough to have been aware of what was going on 20 years ago, but each year, he wants them to consider what happened and the heroism involved and the lives lost.
The world is a different place now. Safety is not something we take for granted. If we ever thought that there were limits to what evil can accomplish in the world, those notions are as erased as the towers.
So as we keep one fist in the air as a constant reminder to our foes that such acts we will not abide, today, with the other hand, we reach out in love and comfort to those who lost loved ones that day, those who were injured and died later and those who, to this day, still carry the scars of what happened 20 years ago.