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Our weekend of reflection begins, but there have been some lead-in stories in the past couple of days. One of them that I enjoyed posting was the article yesterday about the huge flag making the rounds of the country and different people/organizations sewing repairs and patches to make it whole. Last week it stopped by a firehouse in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and that visit was the focus of the STORY HERE. If you missed it, click on the link and be sure to watch the video that we linked to also.
As I mentioned in yesterday's Lineup, we will be posting personal essays from all the GeezerGuys today and tomorrow with their personal reflections or experiences from that tragic day ten years ago. These remembrances are varied and interesting, so be sure to check in periodically today and tomorrow to read them.
As serious as this anniversay is, and as weighty it is on the hearts of the thousands of people in New York and Washington, it is no impediment to the shameless politicians who will always horn in to glorify themselves and get their pictures taken. One example is a press conference held Thursday by one of New York's U. S. Senators, Kirsten Gillibrand. Online newspaper am-New York begins the STORY:
The radios that failed first responders during the 9/11 terrorist attacks still aren’t up-to-date 10 years later — and politicians are to blame, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand told amNewYork Thursday.
"The solution to this national security problem hasn’t languished due to the lack of technological know-how, it’s languished due to the lack of political will by Congress," said Gillibrand (D-NY), a co-sponsor of a bill that would create interoperability of communications devices between local, state, and federal emergency workers. "A 16-year-old kid with a smart phone has more advanced technology and communication capability than a police force or a firefighter carrying a radio and that has to change."
Gillibrand called the lack of a nationwide, wireless network for first responders a "huge problem," pointing out that emergency workers need the equipment across the country, for anything from a natural disaster — like the recent earthquake and tropical storm that reached New York — or a terrorist attack.
While she had been pushing to get the bill approved by the tragedy’s 10th anniversary, she now hopes to get the feat accomplished by the end of the year, saying that political momentum needed is now "on our side."
What she's conveniently overlooking is the fact that the radio frequencies required for this network haven't become available until recently. The spectrum that contains the newly-assigned frequencies was formerly used by television stations until they went all-digital a couple of years ago. And then once the spectrum was opened up there were things like frequency auctions and challenges to the preferred assignments, etc. (See my Morning Lineup from March 25, 2008 HERE for a more detailed explanation.) When she says that the momentum is now "on our side" it's because they have just been released and the engineering needed for it is underway. But that didn't stop her from surrounding herself with 1st-responders and officials and choosing a day when the other momentum, namely the commemoration activities, is picking up speed and news agencies are focused on getting as much "9/11 stuff" as possible. And don't forget that she's only been a senator for a little over a year, long after all this work was put in motion. A great opportunity for shameless self-promotion.
Let's do some self-promotion of our own and get this equipment checked out now. I'll get more coffee started, we'll be needing it.
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9/11 in Memory and Memorial
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I traveled to New York last week to see War Horse, a play about the First World War as seen through the eyes of Joey, a horse, sold by his owner into army service. Joey serves with utterly useless distinction in the British Calvary on the fields of France before being captured by the Germans. In a way, it is a memorial to the marathon of horrors we call war, absent the granite and marble.
Michael Morpurgo
Being in New York on the eve of the tenth anniversary of September 2011 and seeing a play about the senseless losses of World War I makes me wonder how the terrorist attacks will become part of our collective American Experience, as all great events must with the passage of time.
Today, we know it as a date, as in December 7th, its emotional and historic predecessor. We employ the short-hand form of the three digits of its month and day, 9/11. Those two numbers, nine-eleven, conjure up the jarring images of a sunny and peaceful day which ends with the deaths of thousands in a whirlwind of billowing dust. But, will our understanding of the event stop there?
The slogan for 9/11, or at least one of them, is "Never Forget" but surely that is inevitable to a degree, as those that witnessed it first-hand and those that felt the loss the greatest grow up, and grow old. Time does heal all wounds mostly by obscuring anguish in a fog of distant and hazy memories though even the densest fog will occasionally lift revealing the stark landscapes of our lives, with all our valleys and peaks. For better or worse, the inescapable fact is that life (and death) goes on.
We attempt to stave off that fading into nothingness by creating monuments and memorials to honor loss and sacrifice. It is our tradition to create touchstones, literally, where the past becomes real again, if only for an instant. It is a wonder that a memorial, of any type, can be transformed in our minds into a moment that represents a distant time and place. I could know no one killed during the First World War and I have never been to a battlefield cemetery in Europe but I can conjure up a powerful vision, none the less, and in that moment the soldiers live, yet.
World War I Memorial.org
It is a case of mind over matter, or rather at the end of the day, it is the mind that matters. Perhaps the real value of memorials is that they allow those who can't remember, because they were yet unborn, to connect with an act or event and to make it both real and relevant. But great memorials crumble too, and unless the event lives on in our collective consciousness it is destined to disappear over time.
Our remembering now and our desire to memorialize for the future could ultimately be about the need to seek meaning in the most chaotic and inexplicable of events. Memorials may, in a way, allow us to place a kind of metaphysical bookmark, so we can return as we need, to ponder again the "why" of such an occurrence. In that context, memorials, concrete or otherwise, are crucial.
The "why" of 9/11 remains elusive or even unknowable, left for understanding gained through time and patience, perhaps.
If time does soften the blow, hopefully it will not prevent those who perished from being remembered as they were; many of them did extraordinary things.
If we struggle we will see them in our minds as real people first and foremost, before they were swept up in the arm's of history as a three-digit code.
Crystal Inks
……….Eric Lamar
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