Thinking Out LoudTwenty-five years ago today, suicide bombers slammed two passenger jets into the twin towers of the World Trade Center (WTC) in Lower Manhattan, New York. A third plane crashed into the Pentagon, while the last went down in a field in Pennsylvania after passengers stormed the cockpit.
The event now known as the 9/11 attacks shattered the US’s sense of its own inviolability and launched the nation and its allies (including Australia) into military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan to eradicate terrorism. Today, dreams of a safer world have turned to dust: Islamic extremism remains a threat, alongside other challenges.
Dust of a different kind remains a powerful memory of 9/11. When the WTC towers collapsed, they spewed pulverised concrete into the air, causing choking clouds and coating everything in thick layers of the stuff. Some 1.5 million tonnes of steel and debris from the disintegrated buildings lay compacted at Ground Zero, the site where the towers once stood, along with the remains of almost 3,000 people who perished, including emergency responders.
The late journalist William Langewiesche had unrestricted access to Ground Zero during the mammoth recovery effort. In American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center, he described diesel excavators tearing through debris that was then raked by hand to identify human remains. Also, of a devastated older fireman ‘down on his knees, sniffing shovelfuls for the scent of death’. His son, also a fireman, had died in the towers.
Langewiesche asks the Medical Examiner a difficult question: why do we so desperately recover our dead, even if they’re unrecognisable? No simple answer exists.
But one begins with the sense that we’re dust: frail, evanescent. Being mortal, we hoard any trace of those we love. Dust remains truer to our human condition – even when we reach to the skies.
This Thinking Out Loud was first published on Facebook.