It was nine years ago today that I sat in bumper-to-bumper traffic atop the Triboro Bridge, just a few miles north of downtown Manhattan and watched the fireball erupt from the South Tower of the World Trade Center, knowing that it was the precise region of the building where friends worked. In fact, I witnessed three of their incinerations: sudden, deliberate, and unprovoked.
For as agonizing as the attacks were to see unfold before me on the bridge that day, the worst was yet to come. It was the stress of the aftermath.
Because all bridges were closed within New York City within moments, I was unable to get home to my wife and two babies until 3 AM, only to be jolted out of a restless sleep by the sound of fighter jets flying combat air patrols making their turn over our house. We were a nation with sterilized air space and a city with an aircraft carrier offshore sending squadrons of combat jets to protect us.
The sight of physicians and nurses pacing about in the streets outside of St. Vincent’s hospital waiting to lavish their care on the thousands of victims who would never arrive. Parks, street corners, walls filled with posters of missing persons, posted by desperate loved ones. Looking out of our bedroom window from the hilltop we lived on with a commanding view of the New York harbor, night after night, after night, the sky glowed over lower Manhattan from the fires that would burn for months. The endless replays of people jumping to their deaths, of the buildings collapsing.
Then came the worst of all. As I commuted to and from work after grad school, my commute took me over the Brooklyn Bridge a mile from Ground Zero: the unforgettable stench of close to 3,000 corpses deliquescing in the mountain of rubble, my friends and neighbors among them.
We were a city that was stopped dead in our tracks. The indomitable New Yorkers simply stopped, as time stood still. Then something at once beautiful and incongruous happened. It lasted for months. We were courteous to one another on the road. No road rage. No honking. No mad dashing. We were actually deferential. That ocean of goodness in the hearts of New Yorkers, so often masked by the hectic pace of our city’s life, came bubbling to the surface. We felt acutely the bonds of kinship in our common humanity.
As Shakespeare had Henry V say after the Battle of Agincourt, “Here was a royal fellowship of death.”
It became evident when the shock began to wear off, when sometime the following January the streets began to sound more like the old New York. We had begun to heal.
In the months to come, I would learn the names of many more people that I knew from high school and college who perished that day, and for me healing would take a great deal longer than I had thought.
It is hard to forgive a rather large movement of people who seek to kill us simply because of who we are. Unlike the murderer who is apprehended and securely behind bars, the existential threat is real and ongoing. We are at war with men who declared their war on us. Their terms are clear: last man standing.
In this instance I simply do not know how to forgive. Nor do I feel so inclined. If ever a conflict qualified under the “just war” doctrine, this one qualifies. These murderers are equal opportunity killers, turning on fellow Muslims who do not share in their death cult. Does forgiveness not come after the war is over? Can we kill an enemy that we are simultaneously forgiving? Can we kill those we have already forgiven?
It is a unique challenge: to be committed entirely to upholding the dignity of all human life and being committed to a just war, meeting the murderers on the battlefield in a fight of their own choosing. The nations where they live are some of the most brutally repressive on the planet. Stonings, beheadings, amputations of limbs and sense organs as punishments, public hangings, burkahs…
They have chosen war as the means to advance their vision of the world, placing it between Christian civilization and their eighth century barbarism.
But choosing Christian civilization will require more than defeating the enemy wherever he hides and plots. Islam is overtaking Christianity in Europe simply because they are having large families and Christians are contraceiving and aborting themselves out of existence. France, Italy and Spain are projected to have Muslim majorities by the middle of this century. If radical Islam is patient, they will win through attrition.
We can’t very well blame them for having families as we commit civilizational suicide. Contraception, abortion, passive and active euthanasia, healthcare rationing, embryolethal research; ours isn’t such a pretty track record either.
In the interim, I am left with the memories of that terrible day nine years ago and its aftermath. They are memories that are a looking glass into the future if we do not come to our senses and turn from our own death cult a la Margaret Sanger, who is Catholicism’s Osama bin Laden.
And I feel lost. I simply don’t know how to forgive it all.
Coming Home 
Speechless. Thank you. Excellent and thought provoking post.
Great post! Especially I liked the last three paragraphs – it’s what most folks seem to be ignoring, the so called “elephant in the room”. 😦
Solzhenitsyn: from The Gulag Archipelago.
It is already late. The whole hospital is asleep. Kornfeld is finishing his story:
“And on the whole, do you know, I have become convinced that there is no punishment that comes to us in this life on earth which is undeserved. Superficially it can have nothing to do with what we are guilty of in actual fact, but if you go over your life with a fine-tooth comb and ponder it deeply, you will always be able to hunt down that transgression of yours for which you have now received this blow.”
And so it happened that Kornfeld’s prophetic words were his last words on earth, and those words lay upon me as an inheritance. You cannot brush off that kind of inheritance by shrugging your shoulders.
But by that time I myself had matured to similar thoughts. I would have been inclined to endow his words with the significance of a universal law of life. However, one can get all tangled up that way. One would have to admit that, on that basis, those who had received even crueler punishments than imprisonment,those who were shot or burned at the stake, were some sort of super-evildoers. And yet it is the the innocent who are punished most zealously. And what would one then have to say about our torturers? Why does fate not punish them? Why do they prosper?
The only solution to this would be that the meaning of earthly existence lies not, as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering, but in the development of the soul. From that point of view our torturers have been punished most horribly of all: they are turning into swine; they are departing downward from humanity. From that point of view punishment is inflicted on those whose development . . . holds out hope.
It was granted to me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhlemed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains a small corner of evil.
Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: they struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.
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Best to you, Dr. Nadal.
I’m sorry for the loss you and everyone else experienced on that day. God bless all the lives losts and the family and friends who lost loved ones that day.
Europeans are “aborting themselves out of existence”. Aren’t you aware that this is the continent with the world’s LOWEST abortion rate?
Robert,
If you set words off in quotation marks you are indicating the exact words of the author. In the case of your quotation, you grossly misquoted me. I said that in Europe,
“Christians are contraceiving and aborting themselves out of existence.”
Note that I cited contraception first and abortion second and presented them as combinatorial factors in the depopulation of Europe.
Please update your paradigm about the 9/11 psyop.
There were no planes, only computer generated images broadcast by a complicit media.
Thank you.
September Clues,
I edited out your link. I’m never discourteous to commenters, but you are in serious need of therapy.
I watched the second plane fly into the South Tower from atop the Triboro Bridge with my own eyes. I know dozens of family and friends who watched from the shores of Brooklyn and Staten Island.
Get help. You need it.
Gerard,
Likewise, I could say the same thing. It is impossible to witness something which did not happen.
What’s odd to me is why you would say such a thing.
There were only a few eyewitnesses and your name isn’t on the list. Besides, the 9/11 witnesses of record have long since been proven to be paid actors and/or media execs and their employees.
I respectfully submit you watch the suggested video before further claiming to have watched a real plane.
sc
SC,
Get help.
Steptember Clues,
Since when does someone have to be on a official list to see something?
All you need is 2 eyes that see and a brain to identify what you see. Based on what I know about Dr. Gerard Nadal, he has both eyes and a brain. Also, based on having talked with him personally, I’d say he’s more than smart enough to identify a plane crashing into a tower.
God bless.
I can appreciate the desire to be sympathetic to any victims’ families and the need to be patriotic and loyal to one’s country, however, emotions and peer pressure cannot refute facts, physics and a mountain of evidence.
If you know that pigs cannot fly, regardless the number, or credulity of witnesses and TV news videos reporting pigs flying, you know something must be amiss. You’re either the target of a hoax, and/or you have been shown SFX (special effects).
It is impossible for a hollow, fragile, aluminum-skinned airliner to slice through steel columns and several floors of reinforced concrete, as if passing through a cloud. Planes are simply not designed for forward impact, with any solid object. They’re essentially flying aluminum cans; they break apart immediately upon contact; even a small bird can rip right through them, and often do.
The films shown by the news networks to America and the world on 9/11 depicted a plane flying into and through the WTC South Tower without any resistance, without any breakage, without any explosion; in fact without anything one would normally see during a plane crash. The jet glides into the Tower severing steel and concrete; at one point the building even seals itself around the plane and ‘heals’ the entry gash.
Most people have never seen what I describe, since all mainstream video footage shows the ‘plane’ going so fast; the ‘crash’ happens too quickly to notice these details. However, slowing the original broadcast down frame by frame reveals a startling discovery; the planes on 9/11 are exposed as animated simulations, ‘Hollywood’ made for TV special effects.
This revelation, this obvious truth is not shared by me alone; countless others the world over are also suddenly confronted with the realization they were duped by the news media on 9/11. You don’t have to take my word for it, or anyone else. See it for yourself and make up your own mind. Watch September Clues, if you dare.
Thank you for listening; and thank you Dr. Nadal; I wish you only joy and health.
sc
I assume September Clueless also doesn’t believe in the Holocaust either?
But we digress – Osama claims that we are a nation of evil…. – exporting our evil to other parts of the world…..
kind of like
…. making sure that countries may only accept US government aid money ONLY after implementing programs on abortion and contraception……. that sounds evil to me…..
anyway – I believe that we need to pray for the conversion of the terrorists….. similar to the conversion that Saul had……
SC,
You are a sick and twisted individual who has worn out your welcome here. Don’t tell me that I cannot recognize an airplane from two miles away while sitting atop a bridge on a sunny, clear September morning. I’ll repeat myself. I saw that plane in real life, in real time, with my own eyes. And with the immediate explosion I saw three friends’ funeral pyres.
Save your misinformed physics and engineering for rubes who might buy it.
But never comment here again. I don’t need to be told that I’m prone to hallucinating. I was there. You weren’t.
God Bless
Gerard,
I have two friends who also saw the planes hit the twin towers. One was on the Staten Island ferry and the other was much closer, in one of the buildings near the twin towers. I believe them and I believe you.