The Forgotten

Do you remember it?

America's Day of Terror By Mark Riley

POSTED: 4:57 p.m. EDT September 11, 2001

SIDNEY, AUSTRALIA -- People are running out of the smoke in their dozens. Some are screaming. Most have eerily blank expressions. Looks of absolute disbelief. They are covered in ash. They hold handkerchiefs over their mouths to filter out the choking smoke.

"This can't be happening, this can't be happening," one man is saying, over and over. He is slapping his leg. A slap for every word. Harder and harder. "This can't be happening!"

Alan Hess, standing nearby, says: "It is surreal. It is like watching a movie. A horrifying, real-life movie."

The skyline of the city no longer exists as it did. The twin towers that stood as sentinels at the bottom of Manhattan are now a mass of rubble, smoke and indescribable human tragedy.

No one seems to know how many people would have been in the buildings. It was surely thousands.

Thousands of lives lost. Thousands of families destroyed.

Thousands of childhood memories, histories, hopes and dreams, laying dead in the rubble of two towering buildings.

In that rubble, too, lays the once-reflexive feeling of security and strength that Americans held so passionately. It was a security held as inherent in the very structure of the world's greatest democracy - a security now shattered by the worst act of terrorism ever witnessed.

"Leave Manhattan if possible! Leave Manhattan if you can!" the police are yelling at the crowds on the streets.

People look around, wondering where they can go and how they can get there.

The city is clogged. Roads are blocked. The subways are closed. The bridges and tunnels on to and off Manhattan are closed.

The part of the sky that isn't clogged with plumes of black smoke is filled with aircraft.

Military jets zoom overhead. Helicopters have cut off the air space at either end of Manhattan Island. Wall Street is shut down. The financial markets are closed. Mobile phones do not work.

Schools are emptying children into the streets. They hold hands and look around them with expressions of innocence. They cry for their mothers.

Deliverymen slouch in the cabins of their vans, double-parked, triple-parked all around the city. Their radios are blaring with news of the attack.

"America is at war with terrorists," one announcer is screaming. "Our country is at war."

I remember it.

And I remember this.

Even though Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat said he was "horrified" by the attack, The Associated Press reports indicted that thousands of Palestinians celebrated in the streets, chanting "God is great," and even passing out candy to passersby.

Iraqi television played a patriotic song that begins with the words "Down with America!" as images of the World Trade Center's towers falling played across the screen.

Our enemies showed themselves that day. They thought the mighty giant had fallen, and they came out to celebrate.

They danced in the streets and celebrated the deaths of innocent people.

Not politicians. Not military personnel. Americans. Which Americans was irrelevant.

They wouldn't hesitate to dance in the streets to celebrate my death or yours.

Don't be so quick to forget.

Posted by Jennifer at March 26, 2004 10:25 AM