It's a lovely day here in NYC, the sun creeping lower in the sky now and casting the distinctly yellower shades of Autumn on the sidewalks, calm and fair. It is much like that morning fourteen years ago before the calm was shattered. And so my mind went reeling back to my thirties, to who I was that morning, memorizing lines of a play by an author who sadly has since passed away. Many people have since passed away, of course.
I thought I might keep quiet this September 11th, because I wondered if I now felt compelled and falsely so to plunge myself into the grief of that day by the sheer force of voices calling us to remember it. So much has happened to you and to me and to us since then. I will share that among my initial thoughts as the towers came down, beyond the horror of the unfolding chaos, was a soul-scorching realization that we were being plunged into darkness, a darkness like the Dark Ages, like the Armenian Genocide, like the Khmer Rouge, the dark cloud that roams the Earth and descends upon a population occasionally and cruelly, something perhaps like the Holocaust, dark years that stain humanity and culture and everything we know to be true and good from which, I fear, we never fully recover. I was not necessarily wrong in these feelings; the fear that gripped us is evident in the barricades we must cross every single day now to access our most public and cherished institutions, the court house, the ferry boat to Liberty, the friendly skies. But the barricades around the Federal Courthouse in Foley Square have come down I was thrilled to see the other day, and I wondered that anything I said today might fan the flames of fear that I hoped may be subsiding these fourteen years later.
But the confluence of today's anniversary and a recent discovery drives me to write to you and to join in your voices of shared community.
In South Africa earlier this week, the remains of what may be a new species of hominid were discovered in a cave, remote and undisturbed. Smaller brained than we, its hands and feet were uniquely like ours. What made the discovery most astounding is that anthropologists may have stumbled upon the first hominid gravesite. Which begs the good question: What does it mean to be human?
Perhaps it means we are self-aware, aware of our mortality and that of others. Other species exhibit behavior that suggests this awareness as well, elephants for example. But the ritualized burial of these early hominids by their fellows indicates something more profound. Humans recognize one another's dignity and in a cruel and fearful world, work together to memorialize this journey through life's difficult days and fitful nights. "They were here," is a good cry in the dark and we can learn something from that journey if it is indeed remembered.
So I join all of you in remembering today. We all must go the way of the departed. We remember them to tell their good stories, how they survived until they didn't, how they moved the human condition forward, how their stories of light and love and laughter are more important and brave than the stories of cruelty and fear, how their destruction fails our sense of justice, how their creation fuels every good human endeavor.
