Year 3 — Rebirth

Three years have passed by and the mem­ory just fails to fade. I still miss the peo­ple I knew who fell along with the tow­ers and yet I remain hope­ful that some­thing good will come out of this.

Around town, a sense of rebirth is tak­ing shape. WTC 7 is slowly start­ing to appear over the sky­line, renew­ing our sense of shared hope and attempt­ing to fill some of the hole in our hearts. Every­where around ground zero and around the city, we hope for a new rebirth.

Last week, I was at ground zero and, as seems to be the case for the last three years, chills ran down my spine. Then they sub­sided, replaced by a deep sad­ness as I saw a group of tourists point­ing at the grounds and laugh­ing. I don’t know what they were talk­ing about but I felt very sad, left with the empti­ness that only comes from the fact that most peo­ple out­side New York do not under­stand how this hole is no laugh­ing mat­ter. When tourists come, they fail to real­ize that these grounds are a mass grave, where three thou­sands peo­ple died. I still don’t know why they were laugh­ing but I still feel sad. I hope their laugh­ter was based on the promise of a bet­ter day but still I feel sad.

Today is a day of pause. Today is a day of hope.
Today is the day we mourn. Today is a day of rebirth.
Today is the day it ended for many. Today is the day it starts for the rest of us.

“I have learned two lessons in my life: first, there are no suf­fi­cient lit­er­ary, psy­cho­log­i­cal, or his­tor­i­cal answers to human tragedy, only moral ones. Sec­ond, just as despair can come to one another only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings.” — Elie Wiesel