The Missing Towers
One gets a very strange feeling as they drive the looping curve of road that
leads to the entrance of the Lincoln Tunnel from the New Jersey side. From
here, particularly when the traffic was going slow, you could always look
over to your left and see the whole of lower Manhattan laid out in all its
splendor.
These days, one searches for the two gleaming towers that dominated the tip
of the island. Surely it is a dream. Surely, this time they will be there.
They are not.
As September 11, 2002 approaches, I keep thinking we should build those same
two towers again.
I keep thinking of lunches and dinners in Windows on the World, the splendid
restaurant that topped out one of the towers and, from which, walking the
full perimeter of the floor, one could look out at the extraordinary urban
landscape that is New York City and its boroughs, and across the river, New
Jersey. Down below, one could see the Statue of Liberty, looking very tiny in
the harbor.
It makes me angry.
It makes me angry to think that two planes, filled with innocent people, were
turned into flying bombs that literally decimated these two great structures,
these monuments to the economic vitality of this nation.
I want those towers back!
Forget about the new designs. They have already been dismissed and an
international search is on for still more. I say, take out the architectural
plans for the Twin Towers and rebuild them! Tell the crazed Islamists that
they did not achieve anything and will not achieve anything. They have signed
the death warrant for fanatical, fundamentalist Islam.
Many years ago, I visited the Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor. I was a child
when the Japanese sneak attack awoke a sleeping nation, an isolationist
nation, to the reality that it had real enemies. Ironically, the boat I took
to get out to the site was filled mostly with Japanese tourists. What struck
me, once we got there, was that they would pause to pray in front of the
names of those who died that day, December 7, 1941, 'a day that will live in
infamy.'
The Arizona Memorial is a place of silence broken only by the waters that lap
at the twisted, rusting metal of the ship below and the beautiful arching
structure above.
I want the new Twin Towers to be a bustling, noisy place, filled with people
coming and going. Most will have been born after 9-11 and perhaps some will
pause to look at a wall filled with the names of the more than 2,800 who died
there on a long ago day in 2001.
I want the Towers back! I want them because this is America and we will not
be defeated.
