What Happened There?
Peggy Noonan reminds her readers in the WSJ that it has been 25 years. My, doesn’t time fly? Ms. Noonan admits that she spent the last week reading what she had written about 9/11in the past quarter of a century. Ms Noonan admits,
I wrote about 9/11 and attendant themes every week for one year; I felt that my readers and I were processing it together.
Year #1: A lot of street-level reporting; “ the sound and look of a city changed.”
Year #2: Two days after 9/11, people were calling it “what happened,” as in, “they think he died in what happened.”
Ms. Noonan wrote a piece called “What I Saw at the Devastation,” which said that Americans were experiencing an end to the illusion “that we rich and powerful folk will be kept safe by our status, wealth and luck.”
On the 10th anniversary, Ms. Noonan’s theme was “What We Owe the Dead,” writing that it is “memory itself.” What really shocked New Yorkers is that “the buildings came down.”
The buildings were a cloud. The buildings were gone and that was too much to bear because they couldn’t be gone, they couldn’t have fallen. Because no one could knock down those buildings. And it changed everything. It marked a psychic shift in our town between ‘safe’ and ‘not safe.’ It marked the end of impregnable America and began an age of vulnerability.”
Ms. Noonan still thinks that’s true.
The Man in the Red Bandana
On the 15th anniversary, PN used her column as a tribute to a beautiful young man, Welles Crowther.
The day after 9/11, on 9/12, Noonan’s son was aboard a subway taking “a patched-together, roundabout” route back home to Manhattan, and the train came up from a tunnel and started to curl north.
At that point, PN’s son told her, riders would always look left, just for a second, at the towers and the gleam of downtown Manhattan in the sunlight. And that morning everyone turned as usual, and saw the debris cloud where the towers had been. And from everyone in the car came a soft collective sigh, a groan, an ohhhhhhh.
There was a big man, a union guy, tough, standing in the middle of the car, and he looked at everyone else, and then lowered himself to a seat and began to cry.
To Ms. Noonan, her son’s story was reminiscent of the story of the 50th anniversary of Gettysburg, on July 3, 1913.
The living participants, in their 70s and 80s, came in their old uniforms. It was huge, 50,000 returned. They reenacted Pickett’s Charge and something happened. The old Confederates came out of the tree line and began to make their way up the long slope. The Union soldiers awaited them at the famous stone fence, and as they saw the Confederates struggle through in their doomed charge, the Union soldiers made a sound—an ohhhhhhh, “a gigantic gasp of unbelief,” as David McCullough put it in Ken Burns’s “The Civil War.”
It was a sound, writes Peggy Noonan, that said this isn’t only history; it is human tragedy. The Union soldiers found themselves unable to re-enact defeating them. They embraced (him).
What Happened There
How brave, writes Mx. Noonan. “Never lie about the things that break your heart. I’ll never get over it, none of us will.”
