The people of New York deserve a lot of credit

[kpete]

The people of New York deserve a lot of credit for keeping their wits about them on that day. It's too bad the government didn't stay as cool and instead decided to use it as an excuse to bring their neocon wet dream to life.

more:
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/inside-towers.html

[stray cat]

1. Many good people gave their lives that day trying to save others -we should strive to do as well

[DinahMoeHum]

2. A great essay from last year tells of just that. . .

Rebecca Solnit: How 9/11 Should Be Remembered - The Extraordinary Achievements of Ordinary People

http://www.truth-out.org/091009T

(snip)
Many New Yorkers that day committed...feats of solidarity at great risk. In fact, in all the hundreds of oral histories I read and the many interviews I conducted to research my book, A Paradise Built in Hell, I could find no one saying he or she was abandoned or attacked in that great exodus. People were frightened and moving fast, but not in a panic. Careful research has led disaster sociologists to the discovery -- one of their many counter-stereotypical conclusions -- that panic is a vanishingly rare phenomenon in disasters, part of an elaborate mythology of our weakness.

A young man from Pakistan, Usman Farman, told of how he fell down and a Hasidic Jewish man stopped, looked at his pendant's Arabic inscription and then, "with a deep Brooklyn accent he said 'Brother if you don't mind, there is a cloud of glass coming at us. Grab my hand, let's get the hell out of here.' He was the last person I would ever have thought to help me. If it weren't for him I probably would have been engulfed in shattered glass and debris." A blind newspaper vendor was walked to safety by two women, and a third escorted her to her home in the Bronx.
(snip)

:grouphug:

[Cassandra]

3. My favorite story...

is a motorman sent with an empty subway train into the WTC station to get everyone out, including the token clerk, which he did.

My saddest story is hearing later on that people jumped in groups of twenty and thirty from the highest floors. Second saddest was passing the leaflets taped everywhere asking, "Have you seen my Daddy/Mommy?", with descriptions of what they were wearing that day and a picture.

[gratuitous]

4. Indeed

I was watching the recap coverage, and I was rather at a loss to understand how September 11 morphed into another worship service for the military.