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[Steve Minkin]

The World Trade Center Tragedy: Real People, Not Symbols


by Stephen F. Minkin and Debra Blake


In thinking about the World Trade Center, and in thinking about New York,
we are struck by one obvious thought: that the building, like the city
itself, was filled with people from all over the world. Some were citizens,
some were on their way to becoming citizens; others had come to visit this
most cosmopolitan of cities. The World Trade Center not only represented
diversity, but in fact housed diversity's daily face.
 
It is this diversity of the people in New York that fills us with wonder:
its diversity of appearances and gestures, of clothing, skin tones,
languages, and even the most obvious badges of religious affiliation, its
churches, synagogues, mosques, Hindu and Buddhist temples. 

In the aftermath of the tragedy, we have received too many e-mails or read
about too many attacks on Muslims throughout the country. But could any of
those who now attack have visited New York? For if they had, and if they
had walked through the World Trade Center -- or almost any other building
in the city -- they would know without question that there must be many
innocent Muslims lying now, shoulder by shoulder, with the Jewish,
Christian, Buddhist and Hindu dead. What an insult to the grieving families
of all the victims.

Americans need to learn more about the world and in doing so learn more
about this country.  And vice-versa: Americans need to learn more about
their own country and in so doing learn more about the world.

The sight of the airplanes hitting the building, of terrified people
jumping to their deaths, and of the buildings later collapsing was
overwhelming.  But what we haven't seen is even worse to imagine, because
those images will now never come to light: the intertwined stories of all
those people crushed and buried in the rubble; their family tales, their
past struggles and triumphs, their personal histories that brought them, in
the first place, to those buildings on that fateful day.

It was, in a very real way, beyond the fear and terror and sadness that
their final images evoke in all of us, a day in which a great diversity of
people came together. They had worked together that day, traded goods,
shared food. In the end, regardless of what they cried out in their final
moment -- God, or Allah, or Jesus, or any other name of divine recognition,
or if they said nothing -- they spoke the truth of who we are as a country
for we are diverse and they were us. Those who died were, by unlucky
chance, people caught in a profound tragedy and so are we. Not
symbolically, but actually.

The lesson in this heart-wrenching tragedy is that people matter more than
symbols. The tragedy, however, is that the devastation occurred because
symbols mattered more than people. The terrorists attacked what they saw as
a mighty symbol of America, but in the end they killed people. Nothing more
and nothing less.


Stephen F. Minkin and Debra Blake




Steve Minkin
PO Box 6073
Brattleboro, VT 05302

Tel -802-254-4472