The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were, to be blunt, not the prettiest buildings on the planet. I had mocked their sterile shape and structure many times and I'm sure I wasn't alone. What we wouldn't give to still have them here, though, for the atrocity that took place a decade ago to have been confined to a nightmare after consuming a particularly pungent selection of cheese.
In December 1994, my friend Sue and I went to New York City on a five day pre Christmas adventure. Actually, if the truth be known, we went to see Star Trek: Generations, which had come out in the US a full 3 months ahead of the UK and we sat in a cinema near Time Square (not one of the dodgy ones) watching the movie. There was some deal on two features so we also watched the remake of Miracle on 34th Street as well. Not quite two films you would put together but both were very enjoyable.
The picture above was taken from the Staten Island ferry. The Manhattan skyline mesmerised me and I ended up taking so many photos. I really must upload some more of them, especially those of the Chrysler Building, which has to be one of the most attractive pieces of architecture anywhere, ever. Pyramids? Forget it, that art deco roof is the bees' knees as far as I am concerned.
Further away, you could see even more how the Twin Towers dominated the skyline. The buildings around it look tiny, but when you're down at street level, they are massive.
And here's a shot downtown from the top of the Empire State Building.
And, finally, one of me at the bottom of the North Tower. The yellow bag was stuffed full of my purchases from Barnes and Noble bookstore. Our flight wasn't till the evening and we couldn't find anywhere to check our bags. It was a nightmare carrying it around, crammed as it was with books I wouldn't get at home, including a copy of the Tower Commission report bought for a dollar from the second hand bit of the famous bookstore and the memoirs of Peggy Noonan, speechwriter to Reagan and Bush. Please forgive the flowery leggings - I was very attached to them.
The friendliness shown to us that long weekend in New York by the locals made me totally fall in love with the city. I felt so sad for its residents and workers that awful day 10 years ago. I so want to go back there. Beautiful, lively, happy city, with fabulous people.
There's only one thing on all our minds today. The fact that it's, unbelievably, 10 years since the attacks on New York which shocked and changed the world. Many people are posting what they were doing on that day including Mark Cole. Ellen writes here about what it was like to be working in a newspaper office on that day. There have been two days in my lifetime that have been like that - when Diana died and 9/11 where people never forget what they were doing.
For me it started. like most do as an uneventful, unremarkable day. I don't really remember much before 3:08pm here, the time this post is being published, which would have been just after 10 in Manhattan. I know that I'd taken 27 month old Anna to our toddler group at Nether Dechmont Community Centre in Livingston. We came home and I put the tv on to catch the Tweenies with a cup of tea as was our habit. Tweenies for Anna, Earl Grey for me, that is.
We never made it to CBeebies, though. The tv switched on to ITV and there was Kirsty Young talking about some attack on New York.
It took a few minutes to sink in that this was actually happening, thinking how many people had been killed. The South Tower had just collapsed a few minutes before.
The first thing I did was phone my husband at work. When you see something like that happen, even when nobody you know is involved, you just want to speak to the people you love. He was shocked, but was told rather tersely by his boss at the time that he was to get on with his work. At least this man had the good grace to apologise the next day when he went home and saw the enormity of it for himself.
I sat there watching events unfold in shock. I remember Kirsty Young talking to her husband who was in New York - and admiring her professionalism as I would not have felt at all happy if my loved ones had been there.
As it all started to sink in, another emotion started to mingle with the shock - fear. The White House had passed just 9 months before from a reasonable (most of the time) Democrat to an inexperienced right wing president who had surrounded himself with hawks like Dick Cheney. This election had been decided on the basis of a relative handful of votes in Florida. What on earth would this man do in retaliation? How many more lives would be lost in vengeance? How I wished that the dull but essentially sound Al Gore had made it into the Oval Office.
At that point no option seemed off the table. I actually wondered if he'd go nuclear. Thankfully those fears were unjustified, but we have the legacy of the war in Iraq, "extraordinary rendition", torture by any other name, Guantanamo Bay which is bad enough. The whole War on Terror vernacular overshadowed Bush's time in office.
I couldn't get out of my mind that there were other mums at home with toddlers, who'd just maybe had their breakfast, who would have been petrified for the safety of their partners. And many of them would never see them again, would never even have their body to bury. There were children who would never remember their fathers. A few days later, some of the answerphone messages left by people in the Towers or on the planes started to appear on rolling news channels. They were all so full of love. Utterly heartbreaking.
Tragedy was not a new thing - natural disasters and starvation have claimed many millions of lives in equally heartbreaking circumstances. People die, unfairly, every day. But this was different. A huge amount of planning had gone into acts which were deliberately intended to take as many lives as possible. There were 20,000 people in the Twin Towers alone, and heaven knows how many more lives would have been lost if the passengers of United 93 hadn't taken action to wrest control of the aircraft from the hijackers.
Al Qaeda's plan was to attack what they saw as the symbols of western opulence and economic domination. What they did, though, was to claim the lives of innocent, ordinary people. Andrew Reeves had spent that Summer in New York training catering staff, normal people working in food outlets in the World Trade Centre for not very much money. All of them died, something he found very hard to bear.
I watched the United 93 film on STV last night. It did a good job of showing the disbelief and occasional chaos as Air Traffic Control and the military started to react to events, trying to work out what was going on. It was quite hard to watch the people on the plane itself as you just knew that every single one of them was going to die.
To everyone affected by 9/11, those who managed to escape from the Towers and the Pentagon, those who died, those who loved them, the children who grew up without knowing their parents, the firefighters who made it out, those who didn't, those who jumped from the Towers in desperation, you are all in my thoughts today.
If you haven't already, please take a look around the 9/11 Memorial Site. The names of the almost 3000 killed between the 9/11 attacks and the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Centre are displayed on bronze parapets around the new memorial pools. Anyone can visit the site, but there are special arrangements for families.
Nine years ago, at around this time, I arrived home from Toddler group with a 2 and a bit year old Anna, switched on the tv to see if anything had happened in the World as was my habit, and shockingly found that in fact something had. Feelings of horror, sympathy for the people who had lost their lives in such terrible circumstances and their families, and fear about what on earth George W Bush was going to do in retaliation.
I phoned Bob at work. He told his colleagues what had happened. His boss gruffly ordered him to get on with his work. At least he had the decency to acknowledge the scale of the event the next day.
This year's commemoration has been overshadowed by the threat of a small church, ironically called the Dove Outreach Center, where members wander around carrying guns and whose pastor caused international outrage.
It looks, hopefully, as if this won't go ahead.
The whole episode made me want to put a little bit of something a bit more positive out there. In a world of 6 billion unique people, you're going to get 6 billion slightly different views on life, the universe and everything. Most people, of all faiths and none, recognise this and view others' outlook as a chance to listen and learn and live together in mutual respect.
A friend of mine talks about a visit made by her church to a nearby Mosque:
We were generously given a copy of the Koran when a group from our church was warmly welcomed to prayers and a meal at the mosque. Our Koran will always be treated with respect, and I look forward to having time to read it (it is in both English and Arabic.
A group from the mosque had come to our church first, for a discussion evening, and after that we were invited to their shiny new mosque (built entirely from donations). We were warmly welcomed, and shown all over the place, rituals were explained and we were invited to be at the back during prayers (including the women among us). We were introduced to the basics of Islam, including the references to Christ in the Koran, visited an exhibition (much like the ones we find sometimes in our churches), and then shared a fabulous meal with our hosts. The whole visit was characterised by warmth and friendliness, and efforts to explain and understand each another's beliefs, but with no efforts by either side at conversion. When we left we were each offered a beautiful leather-bound copy of the Koran in Arabic with English translation and commentaries. It was a great day.
If everyone in the group reads the Sacred Texts of their own Faiths and looks up the passages about pursuing Peace, this would be a very powerful and prayerful experience. Sacred Texts of all Faiths should be honoured not burned. Peace, Shalom, Salaam to Everyone!
Other groups have suggested that they will replace every Qur'an burned with two - these have been people of all Faiths, the first initiatives from Christian groups.
I think this issue has touched the hearts of many people all over the world.
Feel free to add your own observations in the comments.
