It was a quiet day ten years ago in New York City. Since cities the size of New York seldom ever sleep or are ever really quiet, perhaps it would be better said that it was an ordinary sort of day. People scurried about trying to hold to their routines as they came to the World Trade Center towers and countless other destinations that drew them throughout the city and from sometimes far beyond. Tourists took the elevators to the top to see the panoramic views that were readily available to them on this beautiful Tuesday morning. If they looked back toward the Empire State Building they were reminded that the Trade Center towers had long ago taken its place as the tallest structures both in the city and across so much of the land. Before this day ended, the Empire State Building would again be the tallest structure in New York City.

It was 8:46 AM when the first plane struck the first tower and in an instant, being a tourist was replaced by the possibly of being both a witness to history and to the precursor to ones own death. Those on the top of the first tower were shortly joined by many of those from below who could now only go up as people who scarcely or had never known each other before began to use their cell phones collectively and individually to communicate to loved ones that they were in possible peril of losing their very lives. We are sure that at least a few of them had already been called by loved ones aboard planes that had been hijacked and so they were able to share this common fate with one another. A few probably knew from these calls that there were other modern kamikaze missiles of destruction on their way somewhere. Probably them!

Aboard Flight 77, Barbara Olson spoke to her husband Solicitor General Ted Olson about what had happened to them. She and Ted spoke about their lives together and about the future. One of the last things that she said to him was that the aircraft had suddenly speeded up. Her flight hit the Pentagon! There were many conversations like that on that day!

The cell phones were the special couriers of that day. Many could not get through at all. Some who did got answering machines or voice mail. The doomed left some of the most poignant messages of love and farewell for their loved ones that have ever been heard by mankind. When those message services were checked, those left behind heard the now dead talking so earnestly to them. And, on the pile at Ground Zero, for days after the event, rescue workers constantly heard the sounds of cell phones going off as those who still held out the faintest of hopes tried again and again to reach those that they now loved and appreciated so much more than they had just days and hours before. As the batteries went dead, and realizations set fully in, a great sadness settled over one and all. And, in the months that followed, the streets of New York City were traversed late into the nights with those who wandered aimlessly about in search of the unsearchable. They placed notices printed in the shops of the city on walls, fences and anything else that would hold them, plaintively asking for information. The pictures on those notices were so often evoking enough in their own right. The eyes that looked out onto the world from those photographs told a story of love, curiosity and life now gone all their own.

As the day wore on and those who remained alive who had planned and engineered the construction of the twin towers so many years before began to realize that looking at the Empire State Building and its encounter with a bomber during the Second World War was no match for what their twin handiworks were facing this day. There had been much criticism of the idea of the towers from the time that they were conceived, but, New Yorkers had come to accept and love them as an increasingly more vital part of the famous New York skyline as the years had progressed. They were like two giant oaks along the skyline and New Yorkers and the world at large would come to miss them immensely. A few months after the event, workers would shine two bright beams entitled “A Tribute in Light� up from the pit where the towers had been, and, for a little while, their bright piercing light and presence shined once more onto the nighttime skies. Many there said that it was the first time that they had looked up in months and months.

The second tower was hit lower down than the first one had been struck. Those in the second tower had visual advanced notice of what had happened to the first, so, many of them had taken the elevators down or used the stairs to navigate their way out of harms way. 911 calls were flooding the city’s warning centers and those that are known as first responders were already on their way. Over in New Jersey, responders on a fire truck began their pilgrimage toward the scene as they could see the smoke billowing out of the upper stories of both towers as they made their way. None of them would survive the day as so many fire houses would stand ghostly quiet by nightfall never to be slept in, ate in, or used again by those who had called them both a work location and a second home. As the day and the scene progressed, Father Mychal Judge, the Catholic priest/chaplain who oversaw the spiritual needs of his fireman flock, worried more and more about what was going to happen to his charges as they unselfishly hurried up the stairs to arrive at the scene of a carnage that none of them would have ever forgotten if they had lived to retain any memory of the horrific view that presented itself.. One of the scenes that they might have seen would have been of souls perched out on now blown out windowsills. They looked back into the building at a jet fuel fed inferno that Dante himself could not have improved upon. In the face of this they joined hands with others and made a tremendous leap of faith and found themselves suddenly in God’s awaiting arms. Father Judge, a little later in the day, removed his protective fireman’s helmet to hear the last words of one of his flock, only to be struck in the head by a piece of falling debris. He was killed instantly! In one of the most poignant scenes from that or any other day, some of his fellow firemen stoically bore his body to the closest alter of Christ that they could find at a small church near the scene. They gently and carefully laid him down there so that all of them could be as close to their maker as they could possibly get. They say that there are no atheists in fox holes and it might be true that so many who had never had much use for prayer before suddenly found need of it as that day progressed along because we found ourselves as a nation and a people suddenly cast into a war that would be defined for us by our president as he used a bullhorn and placed his arm around a fireman a few days later in the aftermath at the scene that had now simply become known as “the pile“..

For the next year or so, many would find their way to places of worship around the land as they tried to make some sense of what had happened to those who had perished and to the rest of us.

Over in New Jersey, CNBC, the cable financial network had, for years, maintained a fixed camera looking out over the New York skyline. As the morning wore agonizingly along, Mark Haines, the morning anchor, sat in his chair and used that camera to describe what was happening and about to happen to a captive audience, including this writer, who were riveted to the scene. After the second tower came down, an enormous cloud of dust billowed down from the financial district and through Battery Park and out across New York Harbor. There were no words fitting to describe that scene and Haines did not try to mouth any of them as both he and his audience sat silently and were witnesses to a ghoulish history being made right before their eyes. To this writer, it seemed as if that this dust cloud was as close to a nuclear discharge as I was ever going to witness. It is the best that I can do even ten years on. One of the CNBC reporters, a baldheaded man, came later in the evening on the channel still wearing the dust across his bald head as if it were a badge of honor. And, huddled in alleyways and stairwells all across southern Manhattan Island, there were those who wondered if they too might perish from this seemingly endless stream of dust cast upon both them and us from the Middle East as if it was an endless sandstorm that sometimes plagues that part of the world now delivered unto the West as an answer to the prophecy that Osama Bin Laden had made that our tall buildings would be knocked down. We would later kill Osama but we still wonder if that was enough to compensate for what was done on that day just ten years ago. We would kill many in the ensuing years and so many of our own would be maimed and would die. And, we remember the ancient adage that says: When you seek revenge, dig two graves. One for your enemy and one for yourself! It is sometimes difficult to comprehend that when those seeking revenge against America were willing to die to get it.

There is, after all, such a fine line between genius and insanity and between justice and vengeance.

For the next nine months, the Trade Center site was never really ever quiet again as they constantly, night and day, dug out the remains of all of those who perished there that day. It was punctuated by a seemingly endless series of moments of silence as those, so many volunteers from across this land, observed and remembered those individually who were not so blessed or lucky on that so horrific day that began so ordinarily and has so very much changed each and every one of our lives. One fire department captain digging there recovered the remains of one of his sons who had followed in his fathers footsteps and who now had taken a step far beyond.

Nine years ago today, on the first anniversary of the event, they gathered at the now clean site to commemorate what had gone on there just three hundred and sixty five days before. As they began to read names, again at 8:46 AM, a great wind came up and accompanied their readings for the entire time that they were there. At the Pentagon they gave speeches and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania they had their own commemoration, but, it appeared to some as though those who were lost at the New York site seemed to be telling their commemorators and the world at large that the wind from the beating wings of angels delivered to those with still beating hearts was simply an indication that they were satisfied just to be remembered one and all. They still read names at the site in New York each and every year on this date.

And so, it is ten years on and so very ordinary people did such extraordinary things and died such extraordinary deaths that we, as a nation and a world, are still trying to find a definition for. This date has been called the second Pearl Harbor but for those who died and for those who still remain, the solutions for its cause seemingly remain so very murky and unsatisfying and so very far away. The day has, through the years of this decade, come to mean so much to so many and has been used by some for cheap political advantage as they have appropriated it as a wedge issue to divide and conquer the electorate. Those who have done that have, in effect, betrayed both the day and those who perished on it. As Muslims are indicted for the sins of a few, it is so easily forgotten that Muslims also died at the towers in some numbers on that day. It will be the decision and the mark of this nation just how we will respond to that sort of thing. Will we continue to be a people divided or will we join with those souls who returned with the wind on September eleventh, 2002 to become defined and to become guided by the legacy of that wind?

IOVHO,

Regards,

Joe

Note: This piece is dedicated to the memory of CNBC’s Mark Haines who performed so well on that date but who did not live to see this anniversary.

To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.