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Noted in Passing: 9/11 ” Men like us shouldn’t go out like this. We’re supposed to die in a desperate battle performing great deeds.” And he did.

Every September 11, I Remember This Surprising Story About Steve Buscemi

“It was a privilege to be able to do it,” Buscemi said at the time of his efforts at ground zero. “It was great to connect with the firehouse I used to work with and with some of the guys I worked alongside. And it was enormously helpful for me because while I was working, I didn’t really think about it as much, feel it as much.” On September 12, 2001 and for several days following Brother Steve worked 12-hour shifts alongside other firefighters digging and sifting through the rubble from the World Trade Center looking for survivors.

The Post-9/11 Generation Many of this fall’s freshmen will be the first college students whose answer to the question, “Where were you on 9/11?” will be: I wasn’t born yet.

œRick Rescorla (May 27, 1939  –September 11, 2001)

Rescorla traveled personally, bullhorn in hand, as low as the 10th floor and as high as the 78th floor, encouraging people to stay calm and make their way down the stairs in an orderly fashion. He is reported by many witnesses to have sung “God Bless America,” “Men of Harlech,” and favorites from Gilbert & Sullivan operettas.” Today is a day to be proud to be an American,”  he told evacuees. Rescorla had observed a few months earlier to Hill,” Men like us shouldn’ t go out like this.”  (Referring to his cancer.)”We’re supposed to die in some desperate battle performing great deeds.” And he did.

Architecture reveals the spirit. And the spirit revealed by the 9/11 memorials and the museum is one of despair, death, and hopelessness.   

Take the museum. It sinks into the earth, swallowing the visitor into a sealed crypt. It is a descent into Hell. Here, above the very place where you now stand thousands died in sudden and terrible ways. The bleak, dark, concrete pit around you is barren save for twisted wreckage and scenes of death and destruction. The museum is an obscenity. There is no hope there, no redemption, nothing to assuage the viewer’s soul. No way for him to turn his eyes to heaven. Indeed, even the names of the dead on the plaques in the museum are marked not by crosses—the Christian symbol of hope and resurrection—but by falling leaves. This rich and powerful symbol of hope and redemption ignored for a symbol of hopeless death and a coming cold dark oppression.T he museum is an endless grave—the inside of the abyss represented by the gaping holes on the surface.

The proponent was a common man from the heartland, which, I suspect, is the reason his suggestion was devoid of the embodied nihilism we actually constructed.

His proposal was this: Instead of leaving two giant pits as a reminder of the dead, we ought to have rebuilt the Twin Towers over their old foundations in exact replica save one detail—we ought to have added an additional floor to each building. This addition should have been built of gold and inscribed with the names of the fallen. Therefore, when the sun hit the towers, the top floor would shine with a golden light—a halo for the dead.

On 9/11 And Being American | Joel D. Hirst’s Blog

Communists and socialists see the world in shades of green; envy and bitterness and oppression. Islamists see uniformity under their faith as the only legitimate expression of communalism and violence as their only method of sway. Totalitarians of all stripes looking to control others, but above all us – because we are the great prize – the redoubtable American spirit brought to heel.

It struck me at some point that, from a radical Muslim view, the 9/11 attacks had proved a brilliant stroke in public relations.

Islam was now fashionable on the campuses of the West, and through the dictates of the politically correct, Muslims could no longer be criticized. Any word spoken against the religion, or the religionists, could now be given as an example of the most genocidal racial bigotry; and Christians were once again what they had in mind when touching on the subject of “religious extremism.” Those who resisted the prospect of unimpeded immigration from the Middle East were now “neo-Nazis.”

In the following years after 9/11/2001, we went from wanting to do everything to preserve the land we love to its gradual demise.

We went to war, we lost friends, we lost loved ones and then had a President who clicked his heels and did dance moves for all to see when “he” got the bad guy. We were told by the very same man that we needed to have humility while he did his jig, that we needed to be “less nationalistic” and think with a “world view” and maybe people in other countries would think we suck a little less. All of a sudden, we were apologizing for being Americans and questioning our brutal history as a nation. College professors tried to rewrite it, reteach it. “Activists” started burning it, citing it as the reason for the deep division of the rich and poor and the racial divide in our country. The highly-paid, sheltered elite in gated mansions have been given a platform to speak to the masses and even though they are “embarrassed” for us, the lowly, uneducated “commoners”. Yet, they refuse to leave this country that has made them millions, refuse to part with the millions and equally distribute them to the unfortunate and refuse to take in those they say other Americans are so bigoted and close-minded towards. Cities became large meccas for rich, influential people to preach their ideals of “social programs” to poor and middle-class families and lining their pockets for these initiatives while these families see no benefit. Instead, they become increasingly dependent on entitlements-perpetuating the cycle of poverty and crime while corrupt local politicians stand at the helm. Social justice “warriors” occupy the streets to protest laws put into place to protect people and in the process, destroy the property of hard-working Americans.

It is wrong to call The White House, The White House. It is wrong to be a Capitalist, wrong to be a Christian, wrong to be a self-identified and proud heterosexual of assigned gender at birth.

It is wrong to be against abortion as a form of birth control, wrong to dress your child in gender-assigned clothing or allow them to play with toys that are specific to their gender. It is sexist to grow a beard if you’re a man (but if you’re a woman, it’s commendable in some circles.) Men are not men and women are not women…science and biology is being rewritten as is the English language. Every bloody thing is a microagression that leaves an individual “triggered”. We have meetings at our workplaces about this! We have Social media-Twitter, Facebook, Instagram—all where people are free to spout their opinions and berate others who do not agree with them from the comfort of their own homes in their Snuggies. They post perfect pictures of themselves with perfect filters while drinking soy lattes and eating crepes in their Snuggies. These bullying adults feel somehow entitled to say things online to people they would never even dream to say to someone to their face. These adults behaving badly pass this on to their children who have an overwhelming self-inflated opinion of themselves (and we wonder why) and do the same to their peers who do not go along with their mob mentality. As a result, parenting has run amuck. Between parents who simply don’t care and those who are just too tired who roll over and play dead with their difficult children, we have thugs in schools being bullies that we cannot punish for fear of “profiling”, kids snapping and shooting up their peers along with an increased rate in suicide and depression. Young men and women in our universities were once told by their over-doting parents who denied them any discipline and education in common sense are angry that nothing in this world is free. That they actually have to make sacrifices or work. They are so angry about this injustice, so saddened, that people are opposed to funding their 6-year philosophy degrees and their birth control, they need cry rooms to cope with it all and if they can’t, they eat laundry detergent.

You got answers, yes, but not, I think, the final answer. But it’s coming.

Three months after 9/11, I wasn’t asking college students about literary treatments of the event. At that point I was just a twentysomething magazine editor, and I kept asking, “Why are these fighter jets still flying over Brooklyn?” Or a year later: “When will I start sleeping through the night again?” Those questions eventually had answers.

Mike Rowe: Nike Should’ve Honored 9/11 Heroes on Flight 93

Tom: Deena! If they’re going to crash this plane into the ground, we’re going to have do something!
Deena: What about the authorities?
Tom: We can’t wait for the authorities. I don’t know what they could do anyway.
It’s up to us. I think we can do it.
Deena: What do you want me to do?
Tom: Pray, Deena, just pray.

(after a long pause)

Deena: I love you.
Tom: Don’t worry, we’re going to do something…

Comments on this entry are closed.

  • ghostsniper September 11, 2018, 7:04 PM
  • Snakepit Kansas September 11, 2018, 7:08 PM

    “Let’s roll”. Profound, unselfish and unapologetic. They were looking Death in the face and responded. I talked to my kids about that tonight.

  • Ulysses Toole September 11, 2018, 7:12 PM

    and we’re still arguing visa overstays and border enforcement? immigration (wah?)

  • Casey Klahn September 11, 2018, 7:32 PM

    We need all immigrants like Mr (nee: LT) Rick Rescorla. He was a man’s man’s man, and by that I mean he was a goddam man!

    I feel that some of the stories of heroism, and America’s reaction to 9-11, are a deterrent to further crap from the east. After Todd Beamer, American men were deputized to beat down in flight hazards. The cockpit doors are locked, there is occasionally an air marshall, and always a passenger manifest of raging testosterone on every flight.

  • Casey Klahn September 11, 2018, 11:14 PM

    As you were. Rick Rescorla held the final rank of Colonel. God bless him!

    https://youtu.be/XSEU5zHgcTc

  • Vera September 12, 2018, 11:44 AM

    Whatever you might think of Truthers, these two crazy kids have some interesting observations on what they call “the “Disneyland of grieving.” They are in perfect agreement with American Greatness that “the spirit revealed by the 9/11 memorials and the museum is one of despair, death, and hopelessness.” The Oculus is especially creepy. “Dove of peace, my ass!” It does look like a spine. Reminds me of Panopticon.
    9/11 Memorial
    https://youtu.be/V1peG_AXO-M
    Oculus
    https://youtu.be/KL0gagTBl00

  • ghostsniper September 12, 2018, 2:17 PM

    “Disneyland of grieving”
    =================

    No shit.
    At times it seems as if much of this world is insane now.
    If I “got out more” maybe I’d be insane too and the contrast wouldn’t seem so stark.
    Quite the conundrum, trapped in the confined space of a room full of retards with only a self-made thin blanket named freedom between us.

  • Dirk September 11, 2021, 6:12 PM

    Hero’s, like real leaders, natural leaders Are Born, not built. They do what they do, with not any thought. It’s who they are, how their elders nurtured those genes, taught humbleness., how to manage after action related stuff.

    VI

  • jwm September 11, 2021, 6:12 PM

    Does no one else remember Donald Trump declaring he’d rebuild those towers, only taller?
    I do.
    I remember hearing him say it, and I blurted out, “He ought to be president.”

    JWM