The range of emotions on a day like this in NYC are largely beyond description. Lying down to go to sleep less than a mile from the destruction of the World Trade Center, trying to search through the memories and reflecting on the feelings of today. Nearly in tears many many times as I saw the rescue vehicles speeding to the rubble. Smelling the burning buildings as I walked home. Still now after midnight hearing sirens three blocks away heading in and out of the destruction. The best way to communicate between myself and my family today was using the internet. Both e-mail and Instant Messenger as the phone lines were either jammed or unreliable in the early hours of the destruction. On a national level, wondering which state put up the funding and the resources for the terrorist attacks. Anger and pride. A desire to devote the next few years to rebuilding the WTC and the area around. Also waiting for the "official story" to come out. Listening to the frantic spinning and bullshit already being spewed out of Fox News (and others, that's just the channel on right now) as the historic story is shaped and the truth is quickly brushed under the rug.

I have been most filled with pride with the citizens and the officials of New York City as they rushed to provide whatever aid they could. Going to give blood and being turned away until tomorrow since the centers were already totally filled with people giving the little help they could. Also the policemen and firefighters who are working tirelessly and those that have lost their lives in rescuing those that could be saved as the towers literally collapsed around them. Living in NYC and loving architecture, a fundamental part of my life has changed profoundly.

This is the greatest city in the world and we will rise from these ashes, walk forward, mourn our dead, bear these scars and defy the swine that would bring us low, have us live in fear and force us to rebuke all that and those we work with and for to build slowly, with our shames and our vitcories, the greatest hope for humanity that has ever sprung from the ideas of man and the loins of the earth.

This is not the first nor will it be the last attack upon the United States. I will go loudly into tomorrow's great dawn.


- posted by levinson @ 9/11/2001 09:27:00 PM