I’ve got real mixed feelings on this. In SD we are in a small corner of the world and even the country. If the world had a capital city it would unquestionably be NYC. As for the hero’s, many if not most of these were not soldiers or public servants but rather ordinary people standing up to help others at their own peril which is a very different thing.
In the mid 1980’s, I worked on the 97th floor of the North Tower everyday for a year. Many of you have no idea how big these buildings were and how many people were involved. Each building was home to over 30,000 workers each day. Combined these buildings disappearing off the face of the Earth is not that different than Temecula suddenly vanishing. But it’s not just the buildings. Beneath them was an entire world of workers in a city below the ground. Restarants, stores and a transportation hub for the PATH trains that brought workers into downtown NYC/Wall Street from NJ. I used to take that train everyday. Coming up from the station was a line of HUGE escalators, there had to be 20 of them and they were as long as any I have every seen. For 2 solid hours each day and evening they were jammed packed with a sea of humanity. There had to be close to a million people passing through that station each day. When I see others minimizing what all went down I suspect they have no idea of the actual scale of what happened. It is beyond comprehension to me and I was there hundreds of times. Then there was everything else that went on around it and the clouds of dust enveloping the area for days. If you havent been to this place you must go and see if for yourself. Just like you must go see the Grand Canyon. Neither can be appreciated in pictures or video.
On the other hand I don’t like the commercialization of the great tragedy that this was. Watching football with 12 year old son yesterday we spent a lot of time talking about it. Every once in a while there would be a great, solemn video come on about the tragedy that would move us. Each time it ended with either a Verizon, State Farm or other logo. My son would turn to me each time and say “Dad why did they have to kill that great moment?”
