Memories of 9/11

Seven years ago I was tooling around in our sunny little kitchen on MacKay Court in Palo Alto, California, while preventing my two-year-old from ripping apart the entire newspaper and singing lullabies to my baby,   when the phone rang. My dad called from Germany and told me to turn on the TV - well, and from then on I did what most of the country, and millions of people around the world did. Mesmerized I sat in front of the screen forever, watching the planes fly into the skyscrapers again and again and again. 

Within hours people were lining up in front of hospitals to donate blood. Within days the neighborhood was awash in flags. Within weeks people donated more than 800 million dollars for the WTC survivor fund. Within a month bombs were dropped on Kabul. 

20 people with box cutters and determination had ended an era that started 1989, when the wall came down in Germany, when the Cold War ended.  For the twelve years between the birth of my first and last child there had been a sense of possibility, an attitude of  'let's go ahead and tackle the important issues together', a chance of using reason as the guiding light in politics. Sadly, I think we're all still at Ground Zero in rebuilding the case for reason today. 

Here is a slideshow of how the Twin Towers are still a part of the cultural landscape.