I thought they were beautiful, the Twin Towers. What other people disliked about it—the blockiness, how oversized they were compared to the rest of the city—that appealed to me. In the year 2000 I stood on top of it, the view was phenomenal, the city at my feet.
On September 11, 2001, I was at the news desk in Hilversum when the monitors hanging from the ceiling switched one by one to images of a plume of smoke from the World Trade Center in New York. I quickly called an engineer I recently interviewed in Rotterdam about tall towers. Did he think this tower would be seriously damaged? But I hung up the phone again when I saw on the TV how another plane came into the picture and rammed into the second tower.
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Twenty years later? That’s twenty years of rebuilding my city. The new tallest tower in the Western Hemisphere is called One World Trade Center, alongside the moving memorial to the 2,900 people who died that September day. The skyline is changing rapidly. When you’ve been away for a few weeks, it feels like a new tower has suddenly risen.
New Yorkers no longer think about the attack every day. Many of the people who worked and lived here then have left. Some because of the attack, but most simply because they got another job or wanted a house with a garden. This city has an enormous turnover of people, the collective memory is adjusted every few years.
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Twenty years after 9/11 also means twenty years of the ‘war on terror’, the American campaign designed to keep the country safe. A large-scale attack on the ‘homeland’ has indeed failed to materialize since then, but the US is having a hard time with the costs that this entailed. The Iraq war was a mistake, everyone admits now. And the struggle in Afghanistan recently came to a humiliating end.
America’s prestige has also been shaken by the post-9/11 action. Torture in secret prisons, drone bombing that blew up a wedding and tens of thousands of innocent civilians killed by US military deployment in countries from Somalia to Pakistan.
Now the US promises to play a less aggressive role on the world stage. But President George W. Bush once said, “You’re either with us or with the terrorists.” How different is that from Biden’s message, which talks about a battle between “democratic countries like the US versus autocratic countries like Russia and China”?
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Twenty years after 9/11, the names of the victims are read again in New York. That takes hours, because there are so many names. Many of my fellow townsmen will not be in deep mourning for those hours. They go for a run, are on their way to brunch, visit a museum or sleep in. Ordinary lives, just as ordinary as those of the 2,606 people who had just started their workday in and around the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001.
People who are still mourned – but in silence.
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