"All of a sudden there were people screaming. I saw people jumping out of the building. Their arms were flailing. I stopped taking pictures and started crying." Michael Walters, a freelance photo journalist in Manhattan
As I looked over my left shoulder to merge onto Route 3, so I could just get home, to comfort and what I thought of as safety, the skyline I loved for my entire life was covered in black smoke. I never look at it the same. I never see it through the same eyes. It always seems smoke covered to me. I usually still tear up driving off 3 onto 1&9 to visit my dad.
Bin Laden is dead and people were cheering in the streets. The towers fell and people were cheering in the streets. This day, September 11th is a day that is with me all the time. I still cry about it. I still don't feel the same as I did before it. I mourn the loss of the views of my childhood from my fathers window and Liberty State Park where I played as a little girl. It still makes me want to vomit.
I am not sad that he is dead, I am just not rejoicing in it. I don't feel there is any more resolve or justice than there was yesterday. I feel that hundreds of people are waiting to fill his shoes. I feel like I will never understand a people that are willing to train 12 year old boys and girls to blow themselves up. I feel like people who celebrate death, lose part of their soul. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate. It all makes me feel so sick.
So, what does it all mean? I have no idea. I just know from talking to people, more people feel like this than I thought. Not everyone, that's for sure. Everyone is entitled to feel however they want, this is the United States of America. I try to teach my children as we go in life, and I will never teach them that it is OK to celebrate the death of anyone. War is war, and what needs to be done, needs to be done; I just don't get the celebration. Thousands of people died on September 11th; 2606 at the World Trade Center (plus 1 from a lung condition since the attack), 87 on American Flight 11, 60 on United Flight 75, 125 at the Pentagon, 59 on American Flight 77, and 40 on United Flight 93 in a field in Shanksville PA. The death of one madman will do nothing at all to make any of that any easier to swallow.
