Photo by LUKE FRAZZA/AFP via Getty Images
Distant hatred can ruin a street for decades, and a city can get used to the wreckage.
Washington will remember the Pentagon today. It should. Islamist hijackers struck that building 25 years ago because it is headquarters of the American military. What the capital should also remember is what happened to the places next door — and how quickly this city learned to call the aftermath “normal.”
Northern Virginia felt 9/11 at work more than on the home block. The defense job changed. The clearance changed. The gate at the agency changed. Commutes lengthened around new fences and new rules. The soccer field on Saturday, though, mostly did not. Families kept their streets. That is not nothing. It is also not the whole story of what a free country does to itself after a massacre.
Shanksville, Pennsylvania, became a pilgrimage site, with more than 350,000 annual visitors to a town of a couple hundred. Its residents continued quiet lives, leaving surrounding towns to get the business of visitors making a brief stop. Memory needs a place to stand. A field in Pennsylvania can carry a nation’s grief without ceasing to be a field.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Washington Star
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Wai Wah Chin an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is the founding president of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance of Greater New York, an all-volunteer organization advocating for equal rights for New Yorkers, especially in education.