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9/11: Somber Anniversary

Submitted by SaveArdmoreCoalition on Thu, 2006-09-07 13:08.
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No, it has nothing to do with eminent domain, Ardmore, or development. Nevertheless, it is important that on Monday, September 11, 2006 we all take a minute to remember something we shouldn't forget.

Here are two perspectives from this week's editorial pages of our local papers:

From Main Line Life:

Five years after September 11 what have we learned?
By: Carla Zambelli 09/07/2006

Sept. 11, 2006, is the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City, the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and United Airlines Flight 93's crash in the field in Shanksville, Somerset County. This date has special significance to every American, and intense personal significance to far too many individuals who lost friends and loved ones.

But September 11, wasn't the first time terrorists visited the World Trade Center. In truth, Feb. 26, 1993 was the date of the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York City. [click HERE for more]

And from Main Line Times Editor Susan Greenspon comes this:
Editorial: Lest we forget our everyday heroes after 9/11
By: 09/07/2006

Why is it that five years after Sept. 11, 2001, a time when our nation focused on the heroism of New York City's firefighters, are so few supporting their local volunteer fire companies?

"After 9/11, people said they wouldn't forget," says Lower Merion Fire Chief Charles J. McGarvey about the flurry of volunteerism here after the terrorists' attacks.

"Guess what?" he adds. "They forgot."

There are 2,462 volunteer fire departments in this state - more than any other state. Seventeen of those companies serve the lower and upper Main Line areas, including Lower Merion's seven. Thirty years ago, there were nearly 300,000 volunteer firefighters in the state. Today that number has dwindled to less than 75,000.

The 291 volunteer firefighters in Lower Merion Township risk their safety to ensure ours. Within seconds of a fire call, they drop everything - leaving family gatherings, meetings, jobs, classes, or their warm beds on icy winter nights.
All for no pay.

They are there because of tradition, of pride, of a sense of duty.[for more click HERE]

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Submitted by SaveArdmoreCoalition on Mon, 2006-09-11 08:37.
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John Grogan | September light darkens morningBy John Grogan
Inquirer Columnist

If April is the cruelest month, as T.S. Eliot so famously proclaimed, then September surely should be the kindest.

The heat and humidity of August are gone, swept away by dry, crisp air that carries the faint promise, but none of the gloom, of the autumn to come. Sunset, that impossibly late-night showstopper of summer, returns to a more civilized hour. The goldenrod has turned the meadows to yellow.

The days are mild, the nights perfect for sleeping beneath an open window, a blanket pulled to the chin.

The light is different this time of year, radiant and slanted and full of hope. A light you'd expect to find in Tuscany, yet here it is on a sleepy hillside in Pennsylvania, shafting through the white pines, bathing the towering cornfields in gauzy gold, dancing over the soybeans. A happy light.

A happy light, and yet this is the very same light of that morning five years ago today. The light of that brilliant and dreadful day.

The light through which we all watched loaded jetliners crash into filled office towers. The light through which television cameras captured innocents plunging to their deaths.

Sept. 11, 2001. Is it possible that half a decade already has passed?

We have come so far and moved so little. Our troops have chased terrorists into the most remote corners of the planet. Our country has marched into a war no one, not even the president, can quite explain.

At home, we Americans sit zombielike as our civil liberties quietly erode. We swallow hard and shrug off the concept that the United States of America, this great, bighearted land of freedom and liberty, might be condoning torture.

It's a different age, a different time, we say with resignation. Sadly it is. In many ways our lives have returned to normal. Once again, we are free to follow the ups and downs of Brad and Angelina and Jen and Vince. We listen in as cable television obsesses about the disappearances of pretty white girls.

And just when life seems utterly mundane again, we find ourselves standing in long security lines dumping our shampoo and toothpaste into trash bins, wondering whether the next passenger's soft drink might be an explosive in disguise....

Reuters:9/11: The story of a lifetime

By Paul J. Gough

NEW YORK (Hollywood Reporter) - The news came into Matt Lauer's ear as he interviewed a Howard Hughes biographer on what felt like another slow news day in the summer of shark attacks and Chandra Levy.

"Go to commercial," "Today" executive producer Jonathan Wald told him tersely. "Breaking news: A plane has hit the World Trade Center."

That's all anyone knew at 8:50 a.m. ET on Tuesday, September 11, 2001.

.....That same moment on "Today," Lauer and Couric were talking to an NBC News producer, Elliott Walker, who was walking her daughter to school nearby when the first plane struck. It is Walker who tells "Today" of the second attack.

"Another one just hit," Walker says urgently. "Something else just hit, a very large plane." Another witness confirms: "It looks like a movie, I saw a jet, a large jet ... I watched the plane fly into the World Trade Center."
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