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Let's face it, the World Trade Center, actually a complex of seven buildings with the centerpieces the towers which once stood majestically in Lower Manhattan, wasn't exactly an architectural beauty.
They were even called ugly.
The two primary towers, one rising to 1,368 feet, the other to 1,362 feet, dominated the landscape and were a source of boundless pride and tributes to the supremacy of American commerce for politicians and builders even as most New Yorkers regarded them as impressive but essentially unattractive oblong boxes reaching into the skies.
My family and I visited the World Trade Center in 1988 along with an aged uncle from Ireland. My uncle, terrified of heights, stood petrified against the back wall of the Top of the World observatory and understatedly remarked that the view was "very nice."
Soaring a full hundred feet above the Empire State Building, the WTC did indeed provide a "very nice" panorama, remarkable, breathtaking views for miles in every direction, in fact, even if the design of the towers was less than pleasing. Those vistas and the pride New Yorkers and all Americans felt for the World Trade Center fully compensated for the towers' stark severity, described by one architect as "glass-and-metal filing cabinets."
Despite all their architectural and aesthetic flaws, I still miss the strange, symmetrical elegance of those "filing cabinets" and, despite the passage of ten years, I freely admit that I still weep over the events of September 11th, 2001.
None of us could have anticipated the devastation wreaked on America on that brilliantly-bright morning.
What happened that day didn't simply involve the destruction of human life and of buildings. It didn't merely represent a shocking, unprovoked attack on our homeland. It involved much more than the resultant phenomenal costs, disruptions, and upheavals.
Obviously, the greatest loss was the 2,753 lives snuffed out but not to be forgotten either was the loss of Americans' illusory senses of invulnerability and indestructibility, the loss of our collective national innocence.
Those attributes were barely shaken by the failed attempt to knock down the towers in 1993 primarily because they failed. Eight years later they succeeded. What could never happen, happened.
The incomprehensibility of 9/11 was perhaps best illustrated in the reaction of a WTC survivor. Amid all the stories that flowed out of the horror of a decade ago, one was especially striking as emblematic of the end of American innocence.
As cited in "3 Retrospectives on the World Trade Center:" "An anonymous woman who had fled the burning but still standing towers had sought refuge in a local retail store a distance away from the infernos.
"Still in shock, seated on a dirty floor, she listened to the distant thunder and watched through the store windows as crazed people continued to race past. She buried her face in her hands until a stranger said to her, 'They're gone.'
"Confused and distraught, she was unable to make sense of the stranger's cryptic words, and asked in a shaky voice, 'What do you mean they're gone?' "
"The towers. They're gone."
"Still unable to fathom, or unwilling to accept the meaning of four simple words, she blinked and grimaced as she asked again, incredulously, 'What do you mean, they're gone?' "
They, the towers, were inexplicably "gone," collapsed in a fiery conflagration of smoke and ash, in the detritus of concrete and steel, in the residue of human remains.
No one knows the ultimate reaction of that survivor and no one knows what will be the ultimate reaction of our government. We have gone to war, suffered tens of thousands of casualties, and killed Osama bin laden. Yet, we are nowhere near eradicating the source of that woman's grief.
Purely by happenstance, I didn't lose any family members on 9/11 and I wasn't in New York to personally witness the horrors although my son was.
In disbelief, he watched the towers crumble from the safety of his office three miles uptown. He described the sight later as, "surreal," nightmarishly irrational. He couldn't see from that distance the worst nightmare of all, hundreds of people electing to leap to their deaths a thousand feet below instead of choosing their only other option of being incinerated.
In the apparent belief Americans are too squeamish to handle the truth, the media to this day refuses to show the pictures of those brave men and women, those "jumpers," as the media referred to them.
I have a message to the media: After September 11th, 2001, Americans can handle virtually anything. What we may not be equipped to deal with is a 9/11 redux, a scenario for which our president and other leaders seem to be preparing us, a repeat cataclysm that could very well dwarf the horrific events of ten years ago and render those bitter memories moot.
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