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Health & Fitness

Ex New Yorkers Still Grieve for 9/11

One of our NYC alma maters was WNET/13, the PBS flagship station for which Jack (Ofield) directed the seminal series "Critique" and "Free Time."  His first major network special was "Soft Parade," the last concert of Jim Morrison and The Doors.

When the digital revolution gained momentum in 1998-99, flagship PBS stations received federal dollars to built transmitters that would move them from analog to all-digital.  On the morning of 9/11, engineer Rod Coppola, 47, and five assistants were atop Tower One, the South Tower, putting the finishing touches on the $8 million WNET transmitter.

That morning in Lemon Grove we were readying to leave for work when our youngest daughter called from El Cajon.  Turn on the TV.

The North Tower was hit at 8:46 a.m.  The footage was continually replayed.  Then, at 9:03 a.m. the South Tower, where Coppola and his crew were working, was hit and instantly replayed to the entire world.  Coppola and crew were never recovered.

Jack had senior film classes to teach at SDSU, so left.  I finished packing my briefcase and headed north on 15 to the Duplication Center, our video lab on Bernardo Center Drive.  The car radio was filled with screaming reports.  There was no way that anyone on the upper floors of either tower could have survived.  

Later, after leaving our programs to be transferred and copied, I headed south on 15.  En route, around 10:30 a.m., came the news of the attempt on the Pentagon.  

My God.  My God.  In a world gone mad I could only call the children from the car.  Where are you.  Are the grandchildren okay.  Stay together.  Get home to Lemon Grove when you can.  Daddy's coming home early.  Let's eat dinner together.

Nobody worked that day.  People watched TV as though their lives depended on it.  Everyone, even indirectly, knew somebody in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, DC, Maryland.  Our family, with children born in the Bronx and Brooklyn, and us parents, who had lived on 13th Street and, later, West End Avenue, all with ties to a city we loved and where we had launched our careers in network television, felt like deer in the headlights.

Who in hell does this stuff.

We recalled our first visit to the WTC and suddenly treasured the trivial little souvenir we purchased one time in the underground mall.  An espresso cup emblazoned with the NYC skyline and the twin towers that still sits on a kitchen shelf.  We're afraid to use it, afraid we'll drop it and lose the last connection with those mighty buildings and the bronze eye in the hardscape at ground level, the eye that closed forever after Al Qaeda showed us how they really feel.

Then came the misadventure in Iraq driven by the Big Lie about uranium and yellow cake.  Comes now the worst president in U.S. history and his own Big Lie, this time, Syria, another "U.S. security" excuse for deflecting voter awareness from the coming debate and votes on the debt ceiling, immigration and health care.

Beyond these awful men (and sell-out women like Hillary Benghazi Clinton), who would drag us into another war with ancient Muslims rooted somewhere in the distant past, we think of the destruction of the Baghdad Archeological Museum in the cradle of humankind and the dispersal of an invaluable collection of art and artifacts.  We, America, made that possible in 2003.

We think of Gertrude Bell, the invincible Brit who founded that same Baghdad Archeological Museum in 1923 and was instrumental in founding and naming Iraq.  When she died in 1926 she was mourned by Arab and Brit alike, for she sought a free, prosperous and cultivated Iraq, the mainspring of a revival of Arab culture and civilization.  It was Bell who urged Britain to reject colonial methods and return Mesopotamia (Iraq) to a "place in the sun."

A year later, traveling in Western Europe, we saw how France flew the Stars and Stripes from every building along the Champs Elysees.  In Berlin the Germans flew the Stars and Stripes along Unter den Linden.  We are all Americans declared our old allies.  Then we went to war and threw it all away.

This is not the moment to retain an amateur student in the White House, one now so embarrassed by his own mismanagement that tonight (Sept. 10) he actually made a speech to the nation in which he asked for and rejected in the same breath a "policy" on Syria.

The one true thing is the tangible evidence of history and the human ability to make culture:  inventions, crafts, literature, music, architecture, art, dance (what the French call "arts et métiers"), and family, all the things that make life worth living and that should be rescued and defended from the kind of oblivion made possible by warmongers. 

The memory of 9/11 is of cultures lost, no paradise regained.   Take care of each other.  There is only you.




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