Tuesday morning was the type of crisp late summer day that makes you glad to be in New York, the rain of the previous evening had washed everything down -- it was the kind of day I remember that crowds would flock to the observation deck for the spectacular view of the greatest city in the world. What followed was as close to a view of hell as any of us will ever see.
It was about 11:30 when a visibly shaken woman on CNN looked into the camera and said, "The World Trade Center towers are now gone.''
Sometimes the simplest statements are the most profound. Who would have thought such a thing could happen -- that a gang of barbarians with box cutters could destroy two 110 story buildings and six thousand of the people who worked in them. Our technology had been turned against us, our innocence and largess were used to humiliate us. Thousands of children were left without fathers and mothers -- terrorism had triumphed over civilization and all of us suddenly realized how vulnerable we were.
The site still smolders and numberless dead are buried in the twisted steel and broken concrete. The pity of it is they had no idea what happened that day, or what will happen tomorrow, but for one brief moment before death they realized something terrible had happened.
There must be a reckoning.