I feel somewhat obligated to do some sort of a 9/11-themed post here. I don't have anything in particular to add about the political or moral lessons of that day -- others have done this far better than I could.
I consider myself fortunate that I didn't know anyone who died that day. Strangely, one of the memories that lingers with me is the time my grandfather took me to lunch at Windows on the World, the restaurant at the top of One World Trade Center, probably in 1979 or 1980, when I was around ten years old. I can still remember sipping cocoa and watching the city far, far below. We were just two of the probably hundreds of thousands of people who ate there during the restaurant's 25-year existence, but it was a special treat for me at the time. It is unsettling to me that I am the only thing remaining from that event.
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Another way to think of it is that the steel from WotW is probably still out there in the world, made into a bunch of cars, or in people's homes as a bunch of cans, or more ominously built into the hull of LPD-21.
Anyway, the place itself isn't really gone. It's just doing other work.
Interesting story. When I was in NY a few weeks back I happened to be on a subway car in which all the ads were for a program -- state-level, if I recall right -- for people still suffering medical or emotional problems from the event. The ads presented the program as a municipal thing, for NYers, and were posted in a NY MTA car, after all. It made me wonder if 9/11 isn't evolving into history as a NY event, and the aftermath, the wars, are the national event. I notice I think of the London Blitz as something that happened to Londoners, not something that happened to the UK's capital city. I suppose if the people on Flight 93 hadn't thwarted part of the plan, I'd think differently.
If you'd told me 10 years ago that the WTC and the Pentagon would be hit in a massive attack, I doubt I would've predicted that the Pentagon attack would fade from public memory so quickly.
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