Year: 2002

By Howard Zinn. Article. The Nation. February 2, 2002.
Every day for several months, the New York Times did what should always be done when a tragedy is summed up in a statistic: It gave us miniature portraits of the human beings who died on September 11 — their names, photos, glimmers of their personalities, their idiosyncrasies, how friends and loved ones remember them. I was deeply moved, reading those intimate sketches—"A Poet of Bensonhurst...A Friend, A Sister...Someone to Lean On...Laughter, Win or Lose..." I thought: Those who celebrated the grisly deaths of the people in the twin towers and the Pentagon as a blow to symbols of American dominance in the world—what if, instead of symbols, they could see, up close, the faces of those who lost their lives?