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In Memoriam, 2022
A lot of people doubt that we would all come together now if this country were attacked today as it was twenty-one years ago. They may have forgotten, or never learned, how angry the country still was ten months after the 2000 Presidential election. And it only gets more opinionated and divided all the time. We are going to keep last year’s Grieving Angel at the top of every memorial page. Because it is the anger, not the different opinions and beliefs, that threaten our country. In a nation conceived in unity and dedicated to brotherhood, hatred and division are also kinds of death. This year’s memorial highlights a collage of videos to remind us of how powerful we are when we embrace without judging. That is the way to true liberation and healing. That is the resounding lesson of 9/11 — and the greatest way to honor the sacrifice of that day. The only way we will ever forge an ever more perfect union is to first recognize and celebrate how beautiful America already is and how good it always has been. United, we then can and will “mend our every flaw.” So help us God… PROFILES IN COURAGE Jay Jonas Tommy, Harry, and Mitch Frank Siller Boatlift They responded to 9/11 as officers, now they treat those who stood beside them
“Dirge Without Music” — Edna St. Vincent Millay I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground. Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you. The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love, Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave Since 2005, we have included “Dirge Without Music” in our yearly memorial page because it conveys the enormous, reverberating, personal loss of September 11, 2001. At the Yankee Stadium Prayer Vigil, 12 days after the tragedy, when the final death toll was still not known, one of the speakers, Rabbi Marc Gellman put that same grief into words this way: On that day — on that day, 6,000 people did not die. On that day, one person died 6,000 times. We must understand this and all catastrophes in such a way, for big numbers only numb us to the true measure of mass murder. We say 6,000 died, or we say six million died and the saying and the numbers explain nothing except how much death came in how short a time. Such numbers sound more like scores or ledger entries than deaths of human beings. The real horror of that day lies not in its bigness, but in its smallness. In the small searing death of one person 6,000 times, and that one person was not a number. That person was our father or our mother or our son or our daughter or our grandpa or grandma or brother or sister or cousin or uncle or aunt or friend or lover, our neighbor, our co-worker, the woman who delivered our mail or the guy who put out our fires and arrested the bad guys in our town. And the death of each and every one of them alone would be worthy of such a gathering and such a grief… Favorite Links from Earlier Memorial Pages Clydesdales’ Super Bowl Tribute Tribute In Memoriam Sept 11 Facebook Page The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center Facebook Page World Trade Center Remember Facebook Page Click here for the story behind the “Angel of Grief” |
