I read this article and thought it was a particularly poignant testimony to the strength of America and New York in their handling of the post 9/11 world. It’s a collection of stories about people in New York and how they faced the tragedy of 9/11 without losing who they were to the fear. The real reason that nobody, ever, will be able to take down New York isn’t because they’ve been reduced to a police state. Quite the opposite- it’s because they steadfastly refused to stop being New York or to stop doing the things they always did. They refused to let suspicion stop them from embracing the Muslim residents like they always did, they refused to let the tragedy stop them from living and working where they always did, and they refused to let fear change their views of the world. To coin an overplayed phrase, if New York found itself replaced with a cold fortress, that is when the terrorists win and New Yorkers bravely stood up in the face of terrorism and refused to let that happen.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/11/ny…yafter.html?em

Quote:

The day dawned different and stayed that way. Traffic was thin and sidewalks quiet. The stock exchange didnÂ’t open, nor the airports, the schools, Broadway. People loaded up on bottled water, batteries, canoes. The law enforcement presence was intense: men with machine guns, gunboats circling the harbor.

Downtown, fires burned, smoke plumed. The odor stood.

It was a city humbled and scared, where the possibilities of destruction had been re calibrated. It was Sept. 12, 2001. The day after.

So much has been said and written about what happened on 9/11. The following day is forgotten, just another dulled interlude in the aftermath of an incoherent morning.

But New Yorkers were introduced that day to irreducible presumptions about their wounded city that many believed would harden and become chiseled into the eventÂ’s enduring legacy.

New York would become a fortress city, choked by apprehension and resignation, forever patrolled by soldiers and submarines. Another attack was coming. And soon.

Tourists? Well, who would ever come again? Work in one of the cityÂ’s skyscrapers? Not likely. The Fire Department, gutted by 343 deaths, could never recuperate.

If a crippled downtown Manhattan were to have any chance of regeneration, ground zero had to be rebuilt quickly, a bricks and mortar nose-thumbing to terror.

Eight years later, those presumptions are cobwebbed memories that never came to pass. Indeed, glimpses into a few aspects of the city help measure the gap between what was predicted and what actually came to be.

Read the whole article though. The more powerful parts are too long to quote.