World marks 20th anniversary of 9/11
NEW YORK — The world solemnly marked the 20th anniversary of 9/11 on Saturday, grieving lost lives and shattered American unity in commemorations that unfolded just weeks after the bloody end of the Afghanistan war that was launched in response to the terror attacks.
Victims’ relatives and four U.S. presidents paid respects at the sites where hijacked planes killed nearly 3,000 people in the deadliest act of terrorism on American soil.
Others gathered for observances from Portland, Maine, to Guam, or for volunteer projects on what has become a day of service in the U.S. Foreign leaders expressed sympathy over an attack that happened in the U.S. but claimed victims from more than 90 countries.
“It felt like an evil specter had descended on our world, but it was also a time when many people acted above and beyond the ordinary,” said Mike Low, whose daughter, Sara Low, was a flight attendant on the first plane that crashed.
“As we carry these 20 years forward, I find sustenance in a continuing appreciation for all of those who rose to be more than ordinary people,” the father told a ground zero crowd that included President Joe Biden and former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.
In a video released Friday night, Biden said Sept. 11 illustrated that “unity is our greatest strength.”
Unity is “the thing that’s going to affect our well-being more than anything else,” he added while visiting a volunteer firehouse Saturday after laying a wreath at the 9/11 crash site near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. He later took a moment of silence at the third site, the Pentagon.
The anniversary was observed under the pall of a pandemic and in the shadow of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, which is now ruled by the same Taliban militant group that gave safe haven to the 9/11 plotters.
“It’s hard because you hoped that this would just be a different time and a different world. But sometimes history starts to repeat itself and not in the best of ways,” Thea Trinidad, who lost her father in the attacks, said before reading victims’ names at the ceremony.
Bruce Springsteen and Broadway actors Kelli O’hara and Chris Jackson sang at the commemoration, but by tradition, no politicians spoke there.
At the Pennsylvania site — where passengers and crew fought to regain control of a plane believed to have been targeted at the U.S. Capitol or the White House — former President George W. Bush said Sept. 11 showed that Americans can come together despite their differences.
“So much of our politics has become a naked appeal to anger, fear and resentment,” said the president who was in office on 9/11. “On America’s day of trial and grief, I saw millions of people instinctively grab their neighbor’s hand and rally to the cause of one another. That is the America I know.”
“It is the truest version of ourselves. It is what we have been and what we can be again.”
Calvin Wilson said a polarized country has “missed the message” of the heroism of the flight’s passengers and crew, which included his brother-in-law, Leroy Homer.
“We don’t focus on the damage. We don’t focus on the hate. We don’t focus
“On America’s day of trial and grief, I saw millions of people instinctively grab their neighbor’s hand and rally to the cause of one another. That is the America I know.”
— Former President George W. Bush
WASHINGTON — Twenty years after 9/11, Sekou Siby still feels the pangs of survivor’s guilt. A cook and dishwasher at the World Trade Center’s Windows on the World restaurant, Siby had swapped shifts that day with a co-worker who ended up dying in the terrorist attacks.
The tragedy sent Siby on a path he had never imagined he would take when he emigrated from the Ivory Coast in 1996: He made it his mission to advocate for higher pay and better working conditions for restaurant workers — a role that has gained importance as the restaurant industry has struggled more than most in the grip of the viral pandemic.
Siby, 56, is now the president of Restaurant Opportunities Center United, a nationwide advocacy group that emerged from the attacks.
The pandemic’s calamitous impact on restaurant workers has raised the group’s profile since last year’s widespread shutdowns initially cost 6 million restaurant workers — nearly half the industry’s total — their jobs. ROC United, using donated funds from foundations, responded by distributing $1.5 million in cash payments to about 5,000 laid-off workers.
The money was a financial life-saver for people like Jazz Salm, 37, who lost her server job at a Sunrise, Florida, Chili’s that closed in March 2020 when the pandemic erupted. The $225 she received from ROC United enabled her to pay her mobile phone bill — her only connection to the internet, which she needed to file for unemployment aid.
Compounding her difficulties, Florida’s unemployment aid system, like other states’, was overwhelmed at the time.
“They were actually the first people to help me out,” Salm said. “It was a month before I saw unemployment. They really saved my rear end.”
ROC United helped keep its members informed during last year’s debates over stimulus checks, supplemental unemployment aid, and other financial support. Salm, along with about 11,000 others, participated in a Facebook Live event with Sen. Elizabeth Warren in May 2020 discussing the Massachusetts Democrat’s “Essential Workers Bill of Rights” that called for hazard pay, protective gear, and paid leave for essential workers, which includes food service workers.
The group has also been active in seeking changes in social policies, having marched on behalf of a higher minimum wage and for the elimination of the federal tipped minimum wage for restaurant waiters, which has remained $2.13 for 30 years.
All the while, Siby has been driven by the memories of his 73 Windows on the World co-workers, many of them fellow immigrants, who died in the 9/11 attacks.
“Without 9/11, there wouldn’t have been a ROC United,” he said. “The fact that I was able to turn whatever anger I had to support other people who were more desperate than me, is what allowed me to turn the corner.”
Windows on the World was a unionized workplace, and after the 9/11 attacks, its union donated money to an informal group that helped former employees who were out of work. In April 2002, that organization became ROC
United, with Siby as its first member. He later worked as a community organizer for the organization, using his fluency in French and Spanish to connect with immigrants in New York City, before becoming executive director in 2017, and CEO last year.
Siby still keeps photos of co-workers he lost that day. One of them shows Abdoul Karim Troare, a fellow immigrant from Ivory Coast who had been Siby’s roommate when he arrived in the United States in 1996.
Traore helped Siby find his job as a cook and dishwasher at Windows on the World. And it was Troare’s wife, Hadidjatou Karamoko, who first alerted Siby to the Sept. 11 attacks. She called to say that Traore wasn’t answering his phone.
Traore had left that morning at 4 a.m. for his other job, delivering newspapers, before heading to the Twin Towers at 7:30 that morning.
“I did not know that it was the last time I was going to see him and hear his voice,” she said Wednesday in a virtual call organized by ROC, her first public comments about her husband.
Another photo captures Siby and Isidro Ottenwalder, who had just obtained his citizenship six months before the attacks, allowing him to travel to his native Dominican Republic to marry before returning to New York City.
And then there was Moises Rivas, who had asked Siby take his Sunday shift at Windows on the World. Rivas, 29, who was performing with his band that Saturday night, didn’t want to work an early morning shift, which often began at 5 am. In return, he offered to work Siby’s shift that Tuesday, Sept. 11. An immigrant from Ecuador, he left behind a wife and two children.
In the years that followed 9/11, ROC United began engaging with victims of other tragedies. After Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, the group established its first chapter outside New York City. It now has 59 employees in 11 cities, including Los Angeles, Chicago and Minneapolis.
Just last month, Minnesota’s attorney general, Keith Ellison, announced a $230,000 settlement with a restaurant chain, the Bartmann Group, that hadn’t paid final paychecks owed to workers who had been laid off, as well as overtime. ROC United had helped the workers bring the complaint and demonstrated outside the one of the chain’s restaurants.
Still, the coronavirus pandemic represents a threat of an altogether different magnitude for U.S. restaurant workers. The industry still employs roughly 1 million fewer people than before the virus hammered the U.S. economy in the spring of 2020.
Some restaurant owners are experimenting with software and automation that can replace waiters and cashiers. “Ghost kitchens,” which cook food in central locations for restaurants that deliver food but don’t have actual storefronts, function with far fewer employees than traditional restaurants. They began before the pandemic but have spread more widely since.
Siby, though, retains an optimistic outlook for the industry. Automation may reshuffle some jobs, he says, but will never fully replace the ability of humans to provide top-notch restaurant service. And ghost kitchens can provide new opportunities for entrepreneurs as well as chefs and delivery workers.
Siby didn’t want to work in restaurants after 9/11. The sights and smells of a commercial kitchen brought back too many painful memories. But now his oldest daughter, Fanta, born three weeks after the attacks, is in her third year of nursing school, and works at Starbucks after a previous job at Chipotle.
Asked what he would say to those struggling with the pandemic, Siby said: “At the time when you think you’ve reached a rock bottom in your life, there is always a light to look forward to. This is where I am, compared to 20 years ago. The light is out there, you just need to seek it.”