America remembers saying we’ll never forget

As the names of each of the 2,801 victims of the World Trade Centre, different nationalities but all-American, rolled off the tongues of the multiple masters of ceremonies at Ground Zero, the city and the nation gave itself up to grief and remembering.

Here was the most powerful nation of the world, humbled, brought to its knees a year ago. Here was Secretary of State Colin Powell reading from the death list just like any other New Yorker, even as President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney grieved out of public focus because of the heightened state of alert in Washington.

The capital, in fact, had been ringed with surface-to-air missile systems, while US embassies around the world had been ordered to shut down in nervous remembrance.

But in New York, families, friends of the victims—there were no strangers today—gathered early in the morning at the frontier of Ground Zero. Bagpipers led them into The Pit, a name affectionately given by city construction workers still levelling out the 16-acre wound in the ground where the twin towers once stood.

Men, women and children placed flags and bunches of roses and orchids on the side of the Pit, their tears dropping onto the freshly turned mud beneath. An enormous American flag hanging over a gleaming skyscraper watched over the crowd. On one side of the wall above The Pit, a large placard read in bold letters: We shall never forget.

So at the stroke of 8.46 am, when the first plane struck the first tower last year, Ground Zero stood together in a moment of silence. In the rest of the city, those on their way to work bunched together in front of TV screens, marking their own moment of homage.

Again at 9.04 am, when the second plane struck the south tower, bells rang out across the city. Then the haunting notes of the hymn, I would be true flowed over the crowd. The crescendo of emotion on display seems to have certainly changed New York forever.

The abandon of the city is edged with a certain desperation, as if its life flashed before its eyes. But as a markedly stronger police force patrolled the city, New Yorkers sought to reassure foreign visitors that ‘‘there was no danger anymore.’’

Outside Ground Zero, the grief could be measured in baubles, key-chains of the twin towers, T-shirts and caps, still photos and digital videos of people from another planet running in sheer terror, to the accompanying sound of a police siren. Small bunches of people crowded around the little laptop that plays and replays those awful moments of September 11.

The audience is gripped by the video, rooted by the horror of the words they have heard over and over and over again, in the last year. Another Plane Seems To Have Just Hit The Second Tower.

Then there are the messages, thousands of impromptu messages written on big sheets and strung along the metal fence that faces the black hole. It’s like a people’s memorial to propitiate the Gods—not the familiar gods of Wall Street located just beyond—but those of grief and karmic destiny.

One message to a child that flaps in the wind behind the tattered bedsheet simply says, ‘‘It’s not as if He doesn’t exist, it’s just that He allows so much to happen.’’

Citizens spoke of those devastating post-9/11 days when bus stands and metro stations of the city were plastered with photos and have-you-seen-him messages, of the massive fear tightening around them like belts of cold steel. Of how New York, on the other side of the world from Afghanistan, had picked itself up and moved on.

So the restaurants are full here and the theatres are packed and the Museum of Modern Art, in the act of restoring itself, has moved to a new facility it built for itself in Queens. The crowds remain.

Meanwhile, the indomitable spirit of the city is alive in the huge banner that drapes over a skyscraper at Ground Zero, flaps in the brisk wind: The human spirit, it says, is not measured by the size of the act, but by the size of the heart.