Two years on, America still has a long way to go
The depth of emotion expressed by Americans on the second anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York City, Washington and that lonely field in Pennsylvania surprised many journalists.
As USA Today writers Gregg Zoroya and Rick Hampson observed in their Friday cover story, “It was supposed to be a day when mourning would morph into remembrance. The future would begin to eclipse the past. The city and the nation would finally move on.
“But then the children began to read the names, and two years disappeared in an instant. Suddenly, Sept. 11, 2003, felt like Sept. 11, 2001.”
Officials deliberately made the second anniversary ceremonies more low key than the events of Sept. 11, 2002, hoping that Americans would have reached a point of healing where a dignified commemoration would do the trick.
They apparently were wrong.
The USA Today story continued:
“The second anniversary of the nation’s worst terrorist attack, which was expected to be a faint imitation of the first, was transformed by a decision to have a list of those lost at the World Trade Center read by their sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews.
“There were other events. The president observed a moment of silence at the White House. A wreath was laid at Arlington National Cemetery. Monuments were dedicated, bells rung and prayers offered across the nation to mark the 3,016 deaths in New York, at the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania.
“But the day’s emotional center was Ground Zero, where about 200 young people, reading a script of nothing more than 2,792 names, produced a drama as poignant and riveting as anything in Shakespeare.
“You had to laugh when one boy threw up his hands in frustration after flubbing a name. You had to cry when one girl, after reading her father’s name, lamented, We miss you sooo much.
“You had to stare as, two by two, with their freckles and braces, their cracking voices and hesitant pronunciations, kids of many nationalities, ethnicities, races, religions and sizes stood bravely at the microphone and spoke their loved ones’ names.”
That is the kind of detailed, yet spare storytelling that the greatest of newspaper writing achieves. It creates a picture quickly and then leaves the reader to experience that portrait. And, it’s the kind of intimate writing that includes the writers in the “you had to” phrases.
Perhaps the biggest surprise came to members of the news media who generally behave as though they are able to get through any tragedy with the aplomb to write about it in print or tell about it on TV and radio. In another USA Today article on Friday, ABC News executive Paul Slavin said he was glad Good Morning America provided live coverage of the ceremony at Ground Zero because, The number of people in this building watching with tears in their eyes tells me there still are really raw, unresolved emotions.
At The Salt Lake Tribune a commemorative page was designed as a wraparound for the A section of Thursday’s newspaper. It was an intentional decision, as was the mix of stories that focused on a few Utahns telling the simple yet profound stories of how their own lives had been changed. Executive Editor Tom Baden said he liked the stories because they told a difficult story from the human level.
He added he was surprised by his own reaction to seeing the images of the two towers falling in various TV shows leading up to the second anniversary of what this newspaper called “The Darkest Day.” “I had forgotten how powerful those images were,” Baden said.
So had I.
Although those terrible images initially were repeated hundreds of times over the first few days after the attacks, they became taboo early on when newspaper and TV executives realized how horrifying they were. They were run again briefly on the first anniversary and some movies and documentaries shown prior to the second anniversary showed them again.
Perhaps this kind of taboo attitude is good, because the emotional response the videotapes evoke seems to be as vivid and painful as it was more than 730 days ago a mixture of anger, bewilderment, horror, sorrow and the terrible understanding of how many human beings and hopes and dreams and unfinished lives were buried in the wreckage.
So, has the nation healed?
I think not.
Will it ever?
Who knows.
The Reader Advocate’s phone number is 801-257-8782. Write to the Reader Advocate, The Salt Lake Tribune, P.O. Box 867, Salt Lake City, Utah 84110. reader.advocate@sltrib.com
Scoreboard:
Number of readers who screamed or swore during phone calls 39
Number of readers upset over the weekly TV section 31
Number of readers who want more world and national news in The Tribune 14
Number of readers who do not want any local news on the front page 21
Number of readers who hate certain daily comics 21
