September 10, 2003 1:02 A.M.

Lest We Forget

I do not normally write on this type of subject. But I saw something a couple of nights ago which has left an unfading impression in my heart.

I was watching PBS. It was airing an installment of a continuing docu-series on New York. More specifically, this week�s program carefully and with great deliberation, showed the entire history of the New York World Trade Center Towers, from concept design, through the construction process, all the way to �

I had never seen it from this vantage point before. I don�t know how it was accomplished. The photographer himself must have been a hero. His camera�s eye did not blink at one second of the horror it was visually recording. The position of the cinematographer appeared to be only a few hundred feet back from the base of the mighty towers. It had to be a greater distance than that, or he would not have survived, but the camera lens reached out and drew it so close that as I watched, it seemed to suck the very breath from my body. At some indefinable moment, I became one with the camera. I stood in the midst of a sea of horrified faces frozen in open mouthed shock, eyes locked upward upon an Armageddion drama unfolding like a scroll as they stood agape. First the plume of blackness billowing from the 110 story torch, being carried like a flag upon an unfelt wind. My mind, trying to stand back a little from the scene, wondered why the human impulse is to instantly cover the mouth with a hand�as though stifling a scream. But the screams were not stifled. No one was even aware of the presence of others. We were all consumed in the eternity filled moment. And then our hearts stopped�as we saw another �missile� come suddenly into view and, Oh my God�again! Screaming, people running for cover�running � just running� The scene repeated itself before disbelieving eyes. (But yes, I realized. I had seen these scenes before. Maybe not so up-close�but I had seen them displayed, over and over again. But what was to follow, I had NEVER seen.) The camera�s eye still did not blink. It was steadily fixed above until what began to happen surely would have been shut out by the human eye. But the camera did not turn away in psychic horror. People did. The sounds of human terror and agony, the shrieks of fear�the roar of destruction and the surrounding city noises of crisis and emergency were deafening�but suddenly I felt an inward silence rise up to enshroud my awareness as I saw it. A giant cataract�a Niagara� of smoke and steel which had been turned to dust, started flowing in rivulets down the sides of the tower, and as it fell at speeds of 0ver 100 miles an hour, it ballooned into a huge volcanic-like eruption falling faster and faster, �undulating like a giant tidal wave toward the ground and advancing upon the crowd, now screaming down every open street and passageway to seek escape. As I watched, the feeling was that of being in the depths of a nightmare, engulfed by something terrifying; desperately trying to run but paralyzed by fear as I viewed the �thing� flooding toward me with great speed. That is what it was like. The camera captured it all. When the towers imploded and fell down upon themselves. That was the horror which was almost more than the mind could grasp. And I was there� I had never seen that part of it before.

I realized that I had curled myself almost into a fetal position as I stared at the TV. As I unwound my body, I thought to myself, �Every adult in America should see this video�lest we forget.�

Lest we forget, that the evil that was perpetrated on America, turned us for a brief shining moment of days, into a people caring, sharing, and united to a degree larger than before, and I am sad to say, larger than now.

Heroes were born in a day. Most of them are unknown.

Martin Luther King once said, �Not everybody can be famous. But everybody can be great.�

That is you. And that is me. Only God may observe it. But as individuals, our challenge is to discover what, for us, it means to be great. America is the home of those individuals.

Lest we forget.

Text � copyright 2003 - 2008 The Homespun Philosopher

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