Never forget

From Jimmy Breslin in the Rolling Stone via the waybackmachine: 

The word on the street was run.

Jim Watson/US Navy/Getty Images

,,....”Mike was signing in at the Forest Park golf course in Queens on Tuesday morning, September 11th. He looked at the television in the office and saw the World Trade Center in flames. His sister Margaret worked there, on the fortieth floor of one of the towers. In one move, Mike was out of the golf course and into his car and on his way into the city, which is what people who live in Queens call Manhattan.

Like nearly all the other firefighters, Mike lived in a two-story neighborhood. At the scene, high above him, seventy, eighty, ninety, a hundred stories up, orange tongues licked the air that now showed between the famous silvery aluminum panels of the buildings. Then a rumble shook the sky and the street. Suddenly, the top third of a 110-story building fell like a cigar ash. On the street, at the foot of the building, Mike Weinberg and two other firefighters dived under a rig, which is what they call an engine. The building fell on the rig and destroyed it and the three men beneath it.

I was nearby, on Liberty Street, when that happened. People shouted and shrieked. The cops and firefighters closest to the buildings ran. What good would they do if they were dead? One word raced up the street. “Run!”

.... O’Neill is standing on the corner. He got out of the building just in time. “We were on a run,” he says. “So we were first due. There were dead bodies in the lobby. We got up to the twentieth floor. There was another explosion. The chief said, ‘Out!’ We’re out in three minutes. Then it went down.”

over 300 firefighters/cops/transit police died trying to save people caught in the fire before it collapsed. 

nor was that the only place attacked.

One of my medical school classmates was involved in the triage in the parking lot of the Pentagon. One reason so few died there was the area that was struck was being renovated to make it bomb proof. And anyone who ever flew into Reagan airport knows you can see the Pentagon on approach to land there. 

My son in law who spent some time workiing in the Pentagon, once showed me the small placque commemorating the attack. The entire area was remade so you can't see where it had been damaged, but they included one burnt stone in the wall, and a plaque.  

and the 4th plane, that crashed in Pennsylvania after flying over Pittsburgh, is near the turnpike, and was seen by a commuter flying into Johnstown, and again that is a commuter flightpath that I know. No, it probably was not aimed at the White House: From the sky, it is hard to identify the WH, but the Capital building is in plain view.

Sigh.

So how did politics turn so ugly since that time? 

Don't ask me. I am a doctor not an expert on social pathology.