September 11th, Nine Years Later

My photograph of the second plane crash from the roof of my building on East 10th street, September 11th, 2001

Here is my post on the subject from 2 years ago including my pictures and my first hand account.

I remember that day, and in the days that followed, witnessing amazing acts of selfless generosity and solidarity in a city notorious for its Social Darwinism. I never imagined that citizens with a global reputation for being self-serving could pull together so magnificently.

I also saw a whole lot of kooks come out of the woodwork proclaiming their paranoid fantasies justified and announcing the doom of all of their oppressors, real and imagined.

Nine years later, it seems that the courage and generosity are entirely forgotten, and the kooks are running the whole show.

Demagogues using September 11th like a cheap whore to further their own ambitions and agendas are a far worse desecration of the memory of the dead from those attacks than any "mosque," church, bar, or porn store built near the site.

The following quote came to my mind in the days following the attack, and I still think it remains a perfect epitaph:

Men never do evil so willingly and so happily as when they do it for the sake of conscience.

--Pascal