‘DON’T FOCUS ON HATE’: WORLD MARKS 20TH ANNIVERSARY
NEW YORK >> The world solemnly marked the 20th anniversary of Sept. 11 on Saturday, remembering the dead, invoking the heroes and taking stock of the aftermath 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.
The anniversary unfolded 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 Sept. 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. In a video released Friday night, Biden addressed the continuing pain of loss but also spotlighted what he called the “central lesson” of Sept. 11: “that at our most vulnerable ... unity is our greatest strength.”
Biden was also paying respects at the two other sites where the Sept. 11 conspirators crashed the jets: the Pentagon and a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
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 Sept. 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 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-inlaw,
LeRoy Homer.
“We don’t focus on the damage. We don’t focus on the hate. We don’t focus on retaliation. We don’t focus on revenge,” Wilson said before the ceremony. “We focus on the good that all of our loved ones have done.”
Former President Donald Trump visited a New York police station and a firehouse, praising responders’ bravery while criticizing
Biden over the pullout from Afghanistan.
The attacks ushered in a new era of fear, war, patriotism and, eventually, polarization. They also redefined security, changing airport checkpoints, police practices and the government’s surveillance powers.
A “war on terror” led to invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, where the longest U.S. war ended last month with a hasty, massive airlift punctuated by a suicide bombing that killed 169 Afghans and 13 American service members and was attributed to a branch of the Islamic State extremist group. The U.S. is now concerned that al-Qaida, the terror network behind Sept. 11, may regroup in Afghanistan, where the Taliban flag once again flew over the presidential palace on Saturday.
Two decades after helping to triage and treat injured colleagues at the Pentagon on Sept. 11, retired Army Col. Malcolm Bruce
Westcott is saddened and frustrated by the continued threat of terrorism.
“I always felt that my generation, my military cohort, would take care of it — we wouldn’t pass it on to anybody else,” said Westcott, of Greensboro, Georgia. “And we passed it on.”
At ground zero, multiple victims’ relatives thanked the troops who fought in Afghanistan, while Melissa Pullis said she was “just happy all the troops are out of Afghanistan.”
“We can’t lose any more military. We don’t even know why we’re fighting, and 20 years went down the drain,” said Pullis, who lost her husband, Edward, and whose son Edward Jr. is serving on the USS Ronald Reagan.
At this point, many of the relatives reciting victims’ names are too young to have known their lost kin. But the families spoke of lives cut short, milestones missed and a loss that still feels immediate.