The Freedom Tower on 9-11

The perfect picture to go with my 9-11 post below......

9-11, Eleven years on

Every year for the past five years I've done a commemorative article post about 9-11.

In 2007, I covered the aspect of "Where Were You on 9-11?". Read it here.

In 2008, I railed against the media not showing pictures of what really happened. Read it here.

In 2009, I talked about how years later, the events still affect us deep down. Read it here.

In 2010, I wanted to know where the memorial was. Read it here.

Last year I looked at how divided we've become as a nation. Read it here.

This year, rather than dwell on the past I want to give some hope for the future. A friend of mine, Joe Steinerman, lives in the Alphabet City area of the Lower East Side and he watched 9-11 unfold from a rooftop on 25th & 5th Avenue. Over the past few months Joe has been sharing in photographs the progress being made on the new Freedom Tower going up at the old WTC site.

In my opinion, it's a more aesthetically appealing design than the boxy original towers, and it's coming along nicely.

Taken in September of 2011

Taken in April of 2012

Taken in June of 2012

Taken in early August 2012

 
While we will never, EVER, forget what happened or those who were lost, it's also good to heal and look to a brighter future.

"But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."---Abraham Lincoln, excerpted from the Gettysburg Address

I also want to take a moment to mention that not everyone who died connected to 9-11 passed on that day. Another friend of mine in NYC, Dave Hawkins, lost his brother six years later. NYPD Detective Kevin G. Hawkins, aged 42, died of kidney cancer, which he contracted after inhaling toxic chemicals and materials while working hundreds of hours at Ground Zero. Detective Hawkins had served with the New York City Police Department for 20 years and was assigned to Mayor Bloomberg's Security Detail.

Detective Hawkins had served with the department for 20 years, and had previously served with the United States Marine Corps. He is survived by his wife and three children. Rest in peace, Kevin.

9-11: Ten Years Later

It's hard to believe that ten years have already passed now since our nation was changed forever....

Oddly, and bothersome to me actually, is that I really don't have anything new to add that hasn't already been said.

In 2007, I covered the aspect of "Where Were You on 9-11?". Read it here.

In 2008, I railed against the media not showing pictures of what really happened. Read it here.

In 2009, I talked about how years later, the events still affect us deep down. Read it here.

In 2010, I wanted to know where the memorial was. Read it here.



For a brief time, we actually came together as a nation. Now I think we're as divided as we've ever been since the 1860's, only it's the Left vs. the Right instead of the North vs. the South. For months after 9-11, everybody flew American flags, most notably on their cars. Now, the Left stands with uncaring bastards who won't let people fly the flag for fear it might offend someone. Tough shit; this is the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA and if an AMERICAN wants to fly an AMERICAN FLAG and if it offends you then either shut your pie hole or leave.

Our nation was founded by Christians with Christian values & ideals. You are free to worship any which way you want here in AMERICA but if you happen to be a Christian then you're now a second-class citizen while AMERICAN laws are being usurped by Islamic Sharia laws and the Leftist bastion of Michigan has been turned into a Caliphate. For damn near a decade a giant crater marked the site where thousands were murdered by radical Islamists, and the Left said the Right was insensitive when a mosque was slated to be built right next door to Ground Zero.

On 9-11 the people of New York were led out of the ashes by a Republican who'd cleaned up the Big Apple and they then replaced him with a filthy rich Leftist who thinks the mosque is a great idea and built himself a giant 54-story skyscraper for his business instead of a memorial to the citizens of his city who were murdered.

Our borders are porous and absorb illegals like a thirsty sponge, and the Left just sees it as a source for voters. The Dear Leader seems to have a never-ending supply of relatives living here illegally and sponging welfare. Great leadership....

Millions of AMERICANS are out of work and the Left sees it as a victory for social welfare programs while sending our jobs and money overseas.

It's terrible that it takes a tragedy to bring us together as a nation and more terrible that we just as quickly become divided again by folks who forget or scoff at what this nation is all about, how & why we were founded and by whom.

Eight years on, and we're still affected...

The building I currently work in lies along the approach path to Charleston International Airport. Whenever I step outside the freezer to thaw out a bit, it only takes a matter of minutes before I have some sort of aircraft scoot past. The airport shares common runways with the Air Force base, so in addition to civilian traffic I get to see an awful lot of C-17s, and the occasional C-130, F-16, F/A-18, or even a stray E-2, P-3, or KC-135.

But most of the time when I hear the whine of turbines it’s either an Airbus 310 or that most ubiquitous of airliners, a Boeing 737. And as I look up into a bright blue Charleston sky and see it in a gentle turn, wheels already down, it often takes me back to another bright blue sky one September morning 8 years ago.

It was across town at another place of employment, and my co-workers and I had spent the better part of the morning gathered around the TV set that we used for watching training videos, stunned and horrified as we watched the coverage of the unfolding situations in New York City, Washington, and Shanksville, Pennsylvania. One employee was so shaken that she had to leave. She drove to her kid’s school, signed the child out, and went home. Back at work, gone was the usual grab-ass, tomfoolery, and light-hearted banter that were the stock and trade of the staff when no one was looking. No one really knew what to say, and we all just sort of numbly sat there collecting our own thoughts.

I tend to notice when things are out of their normal routine. Call it situational awareness if you want, but I noticed a few things rather quickly; the phones weren’t ringing, we had no customers in the store, and when I stepped outside I saw that there was virtually no traffic on Dorchester Road, one of the busiest thoroughfares in the Charleston area. Folks had ceased going about their normal business of the day, because there was definitely nothing normal about that day.

There’s nothing normal about people crashing hijacked airliners into buildings. There’s nothing normal about people jumping to their deaths rather than be incinerated. There’s nothing normal about watching two 110-story buildings crumble. There’s nothing at all normal about watching the fabric of sanity torn asunder.

One of the things that really spooked me though was how quiet it had become. And then it hit me; there was no more air traffic. No air force, no civilians, no nothing. I correctly deduced that they’d grounded all air traffic. And maybe 30 minutes later, I heard a jet.

I felt a momentary dread, wondering if some hijacked plane was headed towards a local target. And I looked up into that bright blue Carolina sky and saw that lonely 737, the last flight left airborne inbound to Charleston. And after it passed, the sky was dead silent again for a few days…


Here we are 8 years later, and it affects me still. I was hundreds of miles away, and I didn’t personally know anyone who perished that day. But when I look up and see a 737, it takes me back to that moment. I can’t even begin to think of what it’s like for the people who were there, and for the people who lost loved ones, friends, co-workers. I know that at least three of my regular readers are New Yorkers (Angel, DD2, and A Guy From Brooklyn), and my heart really goes out to you guys tonight.

I want to include a video that shows the World Trade Center as we all like to remember it, standing proudly in the New York skyline. It’s a clip for my favorite song in the world, Depeche Mode’s 1990 classic “Enjoy the Silence”. It was shot for American release, but was shelved in favor of a more artistic and surreal video by Anton Corbijn. In fact, it was probably only 3 or 4 years ago that I found out it even existed. It’s not even a really great video, with obvious lip-syncing and the mimed keyboard parts not quite matching the various parts of the song, but it was such a bright blue New York City sky when they filmed it on top of one of the towers, and like I said, it’s my favorite song.



And this is why we shouldn't close Gitmo. This is why you don't negotiate with terrorists. This is why you don't let convicted terrorists go free. Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. Don't repeat this...

My 2008 Tribute
http://mojosteve.blogspot.com/2008/09/9-11-seven-years-on.html

My 2007 Tribute
http://mojosteve.blogspot.com/2007/09/911-remembered.html

9/11 Remembered

(Special thanks to Paul Scharff for his photo. www.PaulScharffPhotography.com)



Thankfully it’s not very often when something so horrific and earth-shattering happens that in coming years people will ask “Where were you when such & such happened?” For years the benchmark was the Kennedy assassination. That was six years before I was born, so I can’t give an answer to that one. I was home sick from school in 1981 when Reagan was shot. I was in 4th period study hall when the space shuttle Challenger blew up. I was sitting at home on a Saturday morning having coffee over the morning paper when Columbia blew up. I was on Mount Desert Island servicing an advertising account in April 1999 when Columbine happened. I was at work at the Walterboro dairy branch when Virginia Tech happened. When the Gulf War kicked off in 1991, I was standing in the TV room in my barracks at Fort Riley, Kansas. But I think the defining “where were you” moment of my generation will forever be September 11, 2001.

I’m sure every single one of you remembers where you were and what you were doing. I was standing in front of the TV in a towel on my way from the shower to get dressed for work that Tuesday morning, looking at footage of a fire at the WTC North Tower. They said a plane had hit the building, and all I could think of was a small Cessna, until they said it was a “passenger plane”, and even then I was thinking a small puddle-jumper, not a Boeing 767. Then, as I watched, a second plane struck the South Tower, and right then I knew this was no coincidence. I quickly finished getting dressed and headed to work with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, and as soon as I got to work I heard that another aircraft had hit the Pentagon. That convinced me that there were coordinated terrorist attacks taking place and my mind started racing in CT Mode, thinking back to any & all counter-terror training I received as an MP in the Army. My workplace wasn’t all that far from Charleston Air Force Base and Charleston International Airport, and I started scanning the skies for Bad Things.

At work, everyone was tweeked about what was going on, and I volunteered to run the 5 minutes back to my house for a set of rabbit ears to attach to the TV we had at work to watch training videos. On the way back to work, Howard Stern had stopped all his usual shenanigans and made the command decision to cut his show short and turn the airwaves over to the news people at his New York studios. I remember thinking that was a very professional move on his part, and that you knew things in NYC were bad when Stern got serious. Once back at work we set up the TV, and no one could say a word as we watched the footage. After the first tower collapsed we were all in a sort of shocked daze.

Right about that time the reporters stated that all flights in the nation were being grounded immediately and it occurred to me that I wasn’t hearing the usual jet traffic that was common overhead. And car traffic was a lot less out on super-busy Dorchester Road than was normal. In due course the second tower collapsed and then news about the plane crash in Shanksville, Pennsylvania was broadcast. And somewhere in that span, I heard a jet overhead and ran outside to see what was going on. It was a Boeing 737 that looked to be painted orange and yellow, and it was making a wide circle around Charleston on approach to the airport. Turns out that it was an Air Jamaica flight that was one of the last flights still in the air on the east coast, and they were told to land at the far side of the airport away from the Air Forces hangars until their status could be verified.

I was scheduled off work the next day, and at about 10:30 AM I pulled into the parking lot of the old Red Cross donor center in West Ashley. I felt compelled to do something, anything, to lend a hand. The place was already packed, with a line stretched around the back of the strip mall where the center was located. Not long after we arrived an official told us from that where we were, it could be as much as an 8-hour wait. A few people left, disheartened, but the rest of us stalwarts stayed there in line for what ended up being 10 hours to the time I left the donor center minus a pint of prime AB+. The poor lady in line in front of me found out that after waiting over 9 & a half hours that her blood lacked enough iron to donate, and she was sent home dejected.

A couple weeks after 9/11, I got to thinking that since I’d never actually been in New York City proper, I’d never been in either tower nor had I ever really seen the WTC up close. A memory came to mind at that moment, from October 13, 2000. That was the day I moved back to SC after 7 years in Maine, and as I was coming off the Tappan Zee Bridge over the Hudson River, I looked over real quick towards the city and even from that distance I could faintly see the WTC towers. Little did I know that would be the last time I’d ever see them standing and that less than a year later they’d be gone.

As an Army veteran, I grieved the loss of my fellow comrades-in-arms at the Pentagon. As a former member of the law-enforcement community, I keenly felt the loss of so many firefighters and police officers. As a hockey fan, I mourned the loss of Los Angeles Kings scouts Garnet "Ace" Bailey and Mark Bavis (also a former South Carolina Stingray) on United 175, and as an American and just as a human being, I felt an emptiness at the loss of all the rest. Between the two towers, the Pentagon, and Shanksville, some 3000 people lost their lives, victims and rescuers alike. On this sixth sad anniversary, I salute you all. You are not forgotten. The terrorists did not win, nor will they ever. America will not be diminished, and united we shall stand evermore.