NEW YORK — Suddenly, it was 20 years.
Once again the living victims of the 9/11 attacks — the walking wounded who lost friends …
NEW YORK — Suddenly, it was 20 years. Once again the living victims of the 9/11 attacks — the walking wounded who lost friends and relatives or survived and now wonder why — came back to the place we once called ground zero. They grieved on a morning eerily similar to that Tuesday in 2001 — a cloudless blue sky filled lower Manhattan with bright light and the cool of the fall to come. This year was different, though. Yes, the bagpipers played “Amazing Grace.” Children who were not born on that bloody day read names of uncles and aunts they never met. Firefighters pinged a silver bell to mark the precise times when planes crashed and skyscrapers fell and smoke smudged a perfect azure sky. But the pain seemed deeper now. Trying to measure sorrow is never easy. Was the first 9/11 anniversary, with mourners laying flowers in a construction pit worse than the fifth? Or the 10th? Or the 15th? But 20 years is a benchmark. A generation has been born since the 9/11 attacks. Five presidential elections have taken place. America has fought its longest war. It now battles its worst pandemic in more than a century and faces a sense that our people are more disunited and hateful of each other than any other time since the Civil War. Twenty years ago, Greg Packer, then a highway maintenance worker from Huntington, Long Island, rushed to the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan. His goal: Help anyway he could. He found himself passing out water and meals to fire fighters, police and construction workers who scrambled over the twisted steel and crumbled concrete, attempting to find survivors or recover bodies. What Packer found was a sense of unity that he had never felt before in his nation. “It’s 20 years later and I need to be here to remember and never forget,” Packer said on Saturday as he stood on Greenwich Street, a block from the 9/11 Memorial Plaza and its majestic oak trees and soothing waterfalls and names of the dead. Remembering also makes Packer sad. “We’re dealing with mass shootings,” he said. “We’re dealing with a pandemic and people are not getting along.” The sense of disunity — and its shocking contrast to the united spirit of America in the weeks after the 9/11 attacks — was a theme of Saturday’s memorials.
