By Nancy Hiler
While many of us saw the disaster unfold on a TV screen, far too many residents of the Bellmores and Merricks experienced it firsthand at ground zero.
As we observe the seventh anniversary of 9/11, I've come to realize that for communities such as ours, made up of so many who lost loved ones that day, or who directly experienced the destruction as survivors or as rescuers, it is not a global event, but a matter of personal history. Each of us is involved in this appalling event. Every one of us is enmeshed in this jarring moment in time together, but separately.
Clearly those closest to the devastation and to the horrific losses experience greater dread or sorrow at this anniversary than those of us who witnessed it from a distance. Those of us on the sidelines cannot fathom the wrenching physical and emotional places visited by those who lost friends or family members, those who ran or were pulled to safety, those involved in the rescue and recovery efforts. Still, all of us in this community were affected. We all knew someone who knew someone who....
No other significant event in modern American history took place within a few startling moments during what otherwise would have been a stunningly clear and beautiful day, and just a car or railroad ride from our doorsteps.
Other events may have changed our political or social futures in much greater ways, but, arguably, none has had a greater impact on our humanity, our psyche. Maybe events such as World War I and II, the 1929 stock market crash, rollout of the first Ford Model T, women's suffrage, the Holocaust, the civil rights movement or Watergate have shaped our daily lives and our view of the world as much as, if not more than, Sept. 11, but none is as acute or palpable to those in our community.
Still, ours is not the first generation to witness a momentous tragedy with haunting immediacy and great emotional power. Sept. 11 is not the first (nor will it probably be the last) event to be marked year after year with streaming, seemingly endless network footage.
Consider, for example, the grainy images of the U.S.S. Arizona, destroyed by the Japanese on Dec. 7, or that close-up of JFK Junior as a toddler saluting his father's coffin on Nov. 22, or the frozen-in-time snapshot of a beaming Christa McAuliffe superimposed over her parents viewing the fateful Challenger launch on Jan. 28. I could name more... the Oklahoma City bombing, the Martin Luther King Jr. or Robert Kennedy assassinations, the Columbine school shootings, Hurricane Katrina...and you likely could name others.
The replaying on television of a major tragic event is, of course, designed to remind us that the event occurred, and that it should not to be forgotten. The problem is, in the case of Sept. 11, all of us adults, and far too many children, do not need to be reminded of it.
For most of us in this once sleepy, little Long Island community, it will always be much more difficult to watch footage of the planes hitting the Twin Towers and the buildings collapsing than it ever will be to view the now 65-year-old Pearl Harbor invasion or 1300-mile-away Oklahoma City bombing. This catastrophe is near us in time and in miles, as well in the family and friends who were its victims and heroes. This is our local tragedy.
We each know someone who knew someone...someone who died at ground zero, or escaped from it, or was part of the recovery effort there. We each worried about someone who was there that day or could have been. And far too many of us were right there.
The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks are part of a global history, and a sad local history we all share. It is also an undeniably individual history.
