How to Make Sense of All What Has Happened
By Karmen Kollar
NEW YORK, Sept. 10 – Sitting calmly
on one of the benches around the 9/11 memorial, John Share, a retired British
schoolteacher, was observing the people around him. He has already seen this
place twice; he visited both before and after the attacks. Now he is here one
day before the anniversary as part of a cruise trip, waiting for his tourist
group to gather. He still has vivid memories about his previous visits.
“We discovered the remains of
a human body.” – he heard a police officer saying on his radio a few months after
the event, when he was visiting the site. Recovery works were only finished on
June 10, 2012 and later a sculpture was erected from the remains of the crashed
planes near to where the World Trade Center stood. Even though New Yorkers have
organized many talks, exhibitions, concerts and plays these days to commemorate
the event, John likes to remember in his own way: going back in his memories
and comparing his experiences from before and after the towers fell.
During a visit approximately a
year after the events, he and his wife came by the subway and as he explained,
it was extremely difficult to relate the situation as they were finding it to
what this place has previously been. Just as they were leaving the subway, they
came by all that was remaining of an entrance, flawed. It had a legend on it: “Welcome to the World Trade Center”.
That really brought it home for them. Assuming that once it was the floor of
the entrance, now there was nothing else, just this legend, “Welcome”. It was quite saddening.
“Even though we are not
Americans, we are British, but we still feel for you as we have particular
feelings towards America”, John said. “I think that we have been very important
in each other’s history.”
“I wish they were all still
here.” As he pronounced these words he stopped for a while and his voice
sounded weak. With all those names on the memorial it felt intensely personal
to him. After all, the people who died here were fellow human beings and their
progress was halted very abruptly. According to him, nobody deserves that. “This is man’s inhumanity to man, isn’t
it?”
He still tries to make sense
of how it is possible for someone to commit an act like that. But he came up
with an explanation for himself.
“If there are two people, one
will be jealous, won’t they? And in some cases those jealousies become so
engraved and so setting concrete that they can’t go away.”
In John’s opinion 9/11 is a
terrible example of the excess that people are prepared to go to if they think
they are right. “Whether they possess
sufficient mentality to understand whether their cause is right or wrong
seemingly doesn’t matter, does it? It’s just hit and hurt.”
His group has already gathered
and as he was preparing to leave, he added: “Activity, physical or mental is
life. I think that your nation has done well to overcome this situation which
is progress.”
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