Nearly 20 years ago, the attack on the World Trade Center seemed like the greatest world-shattering event people would experience in their lifetime. After two planes piloted by hijackers slammed into the Twin Towers, killing nearly 3000 people, it brought down the two buildings and spread cancer-inducing dust into the lungs of thousands of first responders. For many of us — especially New Yorkers — the devastation was unlike anything this country had ever seen and prompted 20 years of war in the Middle East.
Then came the coronavirus, Covid 19, the ultimate disrupter, which in many ways overshadowed how one cataclysmic event changed our lives because these for more overwhelming eruption had such global ramifications.
Accordingly, it has also disrupted remembrances for 9/11 this year. After months of being shuttered, the 9/11 Memorial & Museum is reopening but there was doubt as to whether the annual remembrance would take place as it had been for the last two decades. So it is holding a COVID-conscious observance using pre-recorded audio of family members reading the names of loved ones, instead of the usual live readings.
When the 9/11 Memorial announced that it would also cancel its Tribute In Light — the beams that shine into the sky to resemble the Twin Towers, it raised hackles and stirred the bile. Officials said the tribute would put stagehands and electricians needed to install the 88 lights at risk. But in response to a national outcry — which embarrassed Michael Bloomberg — who chairs the 9/11 Memorial — and Gov. Andrew Coumo, the 9/11 Memorial then agreed to erect the lights after all, suddenly saying it could be done safely.
Meanwhile, the Stephen Siller Tunnel to Towers Foundation, which has an annual run to raise money for 9/11 survivors and first-responders, decided to feature live readings in a separate, simultaneous event a short distance from the Ground Zero memorial. Its ceremony will take place at the corner of Liberty and Church streets, next to Zuccotti Park — where the victims’ names were once read aloud before the ceremony was moved to the 9/11 memorial in 2014.
Both events will ring bells and observe six moments of silence at the exact times when hijacked planes crashed into the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and in Shanksville, Pa., and when each tower fell. 297 family members volunteered with Siller to read the names live.
Traditionally, the 9/11 Memorial and Museum has chosen the readers of the names of 2,983 men, women and children killed on 9/11, along with those who perished in the 1993 WTC bombing. But now we have these recordings — to be piped into the memorial plaza — produced to be played in the museum’s “In Memoriam” exhibit, which displays photos of the victims.
The memorial has invited 6,100 family members to attend its ceremony; all will be required to wear masks and maintain social distancing. So even with the occasion of recalling 9/11, the pandemic trumps terrorism.
All this brouhaha proves that this global assault has restructured our way of life in ways the localized tragedy of the Twin Towers attack could never do. And because of that, we now have to find a way to restructure our lives in a fashion we never even expected in 2001. Maybe now, the expectations that we would become so much better people after 9/11 will finally come into play thanks to the world having slipped into the Corona-verse.