US reflects on tragedy and national unity
NEW YORK: Twenty years to the minute after a plane smashed into the northern tower of the World Trade Center, the father of a flight attendant who was on board stood before presidents and grieving families. He recalled how the courage that flared in the midst of a tragedy had helped “pull us through the darkest days of our lives”.
Thus began the ceremonies to mark the 20th anniversary of September 11, 2001, across a nation bitterly divided over new vaccine mandates and shaken from the debacle of a chaotic and bloody withdrawal from Afghanistan.
US President Joe Biden had called for unity in a video address released before the ceremony, recalling the redoubtable spirit that arose in the days after the attack.
“We saw heroism everywhere,” he said. “We also saw something all too rare, a true sense of national unity.”
In the years afterwards, that cohesion had been strained, he said. “We learnt that unity is the one thing that must never break.”
Stepping beneath the swamp oak trees that stand on what was once ground zero, Biden and the first lady Jill Biden were followed by Barack and Michelle Obama and Bill Clinton.
Later Biden would travel to Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where United Airlines flight 93 crashed into a field that day in 2001 – its passengers and crew are believed to have prevented hijackers from diverting it into the US Capitol building.
George W Bush, the president at the time of the attacks, spoke at a memorial service at that site and denounced the nation’s divisions.
“Malign force seems at work in our common life that turns every disagreement into an argument, and every argument into a clash of cultures,” he said.
“So much of our politics has become a naked appeal to anger, fear and resentment.”
Apparently linking the hijackers to the protesters who stormed the Capitol on January 6 this year Bush condemned both “violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home” who seek to “defile national symbols”.
He called them “children of the same foul spirit” and stated: “It is our continuing duty to confront them.”
In contrast, Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump released a message attacking the present occupant of the White House over the country’s exit from Afghanistan.
“The leader of our country was made to look like a fool,” he said, before hinting again at his intent to run for a second term as president in 2024.
“Do not fear,” Trump said. “America will be made great again.”
Biden arrived in Lower Manhattan on Saturday beset by crises. The debacle in Kabul had led some commentators to say he should not attend the memorial at all.
The now-familiar ceremonies to mark the attack were conducted beneath a clear blue sky, as the sun rose behind two of the four new skyscrapers built on ground zero. A bell tolled to mark the moments that the four flights came down. Relatives of those killed read out the names of the 2977 people who died.