By ERNIE NEUFELD, Weyburn Review Associate Publisher
There are places - cities, towns, villages - that enjoy varying shades of significance to us, individually or collectively. Or none at all, as are most of many hundreds remembered from scholastic reference, despite minutia recalled from experience or casual reference.
Most small-town folks have relatively nearby cities, visited so often they acquire personal reality enhanced by exposure to and undeniable connections with the greater world where important things happen and the wonders of the universe unfold themselves. Even nearby market towns may enjoy this cachet on varying but lesser scales.
Other cities are storybook places, vicariously visited through screen or prose exposure investing them with a magnetic pull. Places like Paris come to mind, and Vienna, Rome, Montreal, Rio, Hollywood, London, England, and others.
The last half of the 20th century ushered in another era, one in which television brought into our living rooms, unexpectedly, dramatically, unapologetically and unbidden - and even sickeningly - history as it was recorded, unrehearsed and unedited, before our eyes.
One example was the 1963 drama near a grassy knoll in Dallas, Texas, where and when a hidden marksman assassinated U.S. President John F. Kennedy. We all know exactly where we were when this unfortunate historic clip assaulted us repeatedly, gluing us to television sets for hours.
More recently, the events on a day destined to be known for years to come as Nine-Eleven assailed us repeatedly with horrible, unfathomable, surreal vividness. It is the only day of my life spent almost entirely glued to the screen, with nourishment taken as needed from the nearest and fastest source, and embedded in our consciousness a new and very personal view of New York City.
When we decided recently on a tour to New York City, we agreed not to go to any ghoulish length to view Ground Zero, the site of the once-proud twin towers of the World Trade Center, brought down when two hijacked airliners - with passengers on board - were crash-flown into the towers by terrorists, causing both to collapse with more than 2,000 doomed people in and below them.
Naturally, when a conducted coach tour took us there on our final day, we did not demur and I am now glad we went.
Our first relevant stop was nearby St. Vincent's Hospital, where early casualties were treated, and where the Wall of Hope remains and probably will remain for years to come. On this wall, in the days that followed the disaster, photos and descriptions of missing members were posted by families praying for miracles and begging for information, however disappointing. The wistfully passionate pleadings were almost audible.
Across the street another wall had been spontaneously covered in tiles with religious, patriotic and personal motifs that touched every degree of sentiment crying to be expressed or implied.
Adding to the reality was the calm narration by our intelligent and articulate New Yorker guide, who told of losing close friends on that day, and of visiting his nearby district firehall, the on-duty shift of which had died to a man in the disaster.
Finally, from a damaged but repaired building across the street from the scene of the crime of the century, a special elevated viewing area exposed us to two near-vacant and insignificant-looking blocks on which the twin towers had stood. An unplanned touch was a nearby skyscraper about 50 stories high, almost seeming to have been placed there as a measuring stick to add reality to the fact that the two towers were twice as high.
We were not sorry we had gone; we did not feel ghoulish. Statistics
were cited to demonstrate the economic loss to the city, and there
were other more subtle signs that much remains to be told about
September 11, 2001, and the varying effects of that day on the
people of New York City, New York, and environs, and indeed the
world.
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