I live with a beautiful view of Boston Harbor and of planes taking off and landing at Logan Airport. I have a special bench where I often sit and contemplate those planes as they soar across the harbor. It is a serenely peaceful scene of silent sail boats on the water and giant airplanes landing and lifting in the distance with precision and grace. As incongruous as the sail boats and the planes may seem, they have common ground in that grace and precision of movement. Not a single day goes by that I don’t watch those planes and think of 9/11. No one will ever forget where they were that morning when the news began to trickle in of what had happened in New York. We soon sat glued to the news that not one but two American Airlines flights, originating from Boston’s Logan airport, had slammed into the World Trade Center.
In horror and complete disbelief we watched as the buildings came down and learned that two other aircraft had suffered similar fates that morning. Those of us living in the Boston area slowly began taking stock of the locations of our loved ones and friends. Where were they? Were they traveling today? Were they on business in New York? I was on the playground with my class of preschoolers when the director of the school approached me and calmly asked me where my husband was that day. The question seemed a bit out of place but I told her he was, “In the city.” She said, “What city?” and at that point I realized this was more than a just a casual conversation. When I said, “Boston” she was visibly relieved. Her body sagged a bit as the tension left her shoulders. The director knew that my husband traveled a great deal and always flew on American Airlines. She also knew that he spent a great deal of time in New York.
Although my family was blessed that morning many families we knew were not. A colleague of mine at the preschool lost her sister-in-law in the World Trade Center and spent the next several months in New York with her brother and his three children as they began the long process of grieving and learning to live without their beloved wife and mother. A woman from our community was on one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center. A child was pulled from my daughter’s middle school class to be told that his father was in the World Trade Center when it was hit.
The stories of what happened on September 11, 2001 are the stories of many innocent, brave, frightened, loved human beings who were killed for no other reason than hatred. They were targeted because they could be. The killers didn’t know their victims. The killers weren’t attacking representatives of a government they hated or soldiers of an enemy army. The killers were trained cowards determined to make a huge statement and kill as many innocent people as they could. Terrorists are trained to hit so-called “soft” targets because they can. To kill innocents on airplanes, in office buildings, busses, schools, crowded markets and movie theatres. I often question what they feel they are accomplishing. I understand the argument that terrorists feel they have no other way to fight big governments. But what do they feel they are accomplishing? Is there a terrorist “accountant” keeping track of the “cost-benefit” analysis of all the terrorism over the years. How many school children must die before they feel they have won some kind of battle? Free governments will continue to fight them and will not surrender to their tactics. The terrorists can continue to kill and destroy even their own Muslim brothers as they are now doing in Iraq but they will not win in the end. Do any of them ever stop and look at each other and ask, “Remind me, why are doing this?”
The site of The World Trade Center is not the appropriate place for the International Freedom Center. Not a single thing that happened on September 11, 2001 was about freedom. It was about an attack on freedom by freedom haters. There is only one thing that needs to be memorialized at the World Trade Center. The people on the planes, the people in the buildings, the people who sped to the buildings to save lives and all of the people whose lives have been touched in large and small ways by this horrendous tragedy and brutal attack on our free country. It should be a quiet place of reflection, a solemn place to respect and honor those who perished there and all of those whose lives will never be the same.
If the World Trade Center becomes a political statement on global policy and internationalism I will never visit. If the plan is to force feed us all of history’s examples of man’s inhumanity to man, I won’t go. I won't take my children and grandchildren and my great grandchildren. Instead, I will take them to my bench on Boston Harbor and tell them about what happened that day. I will tell them about the two planes that took off over the water and soared with precision and grace just like the sail boats. I will tell them about the pilots, the passengers, the office workers, the pentagon employees, the firemen, the police, and the doctors. I will even tell them about the rescue dogs. I will tell them about the wives, the husbands, the sons and the daughters who died. I will tell them about children who lost both parents. I will tell them of brave passengers who tried to save their plane. I will tell them of frightened flight attendants calling their loved ones for a final good bye. I will tell them that not a single person in our entire country was left unscathed by this terrible tragedy. We were all hurt and damaged in varying degrees. I will teach them to cherish their lives and their loved ones and to honor those who died that day and to respect and honor those who protect our country. I will teach them to be kind and to strive for peace but that they must never stand by and let injustice, hatred and terror go unchallenged. That is what the World Trade Center should represent, nothing more and nothing less.
