Last Wednesday, relatives and friends of New York firefighter Gerald Baptiste gathered for a funeral to remember him and to praise his selfless service. He was last seen four years ago today, on the 33rd floor of the World Trade Center's north tower, helping people to safety, but his remains were not positively identified until just recently.
Baptiste's funeral is a subtle reminder of how close we are to 9/11, a date that now rolls easily off the tongue and that, like Elvis or the Fourth or Gettysburg, needs no qualifier, no year, no further explanation. It is a term hard-wired into our national identity.
There are other little reminders. One is that relatives of the heroes on United Flight 93 and the National Park Service last week announced the winner of a design contest for a memorial that will stand in the remote field in Pennsylvania where the plane slammed into the ground four years ago today. The Sept. 11 commission concluded that passengers aboard the plane, alerted by cell phones that their hijackers were likely staging an attack on either the Capitol or the White House, stormed the cockpit and forced the crash — an awesome act of putting country ahead of self.
The relatives say that act shows the power regular individuals can wield against evil. One told Scripps Howard News Service, "Al-Qaida had been handed its first defeat by a small group of unarmed individuals, all regular people the morning they boarded the plane. It was a ray of hope and triumph on that day that needs to be spotlighted for all history."
Four years ago today; so why does it seem like so much longer ago? Why does the national unity, the communal mourning and the feeling of shock that made all other pursuits seem trivial now resonate like some quaint memories from the 1940s rather than from the 21st century?
Perhaps because we tend to view the nation only from lenses set up in Washington. Despite its place as the seat of representative government, the picture from there is seldom truly representative.
After the attacks four years ago, members of Congress assembled spontaneously to sing "God Bless America." Today, not quite two weeks after a natural disaster that was more devastating than 9/11, the same folks seem unwilling to harmonize about much of anything. And the president might as well be paddling on driftwood in Lake Pontchartrain.
I suppose it's really not terribly hard to understand what has happened in the interim. The attacks of 9/11 touched off a war that was anything but conventional. If terrorists thrive on creating confusion and mistrust, they seem to be doing quite well, and the costly toll from Iraq, a country not even involved in 9/11, has blurred the focus a bit for many. The Bush administration's slowness in responding to Hurricane Katrina just added to the political sense of hopelessness.
But step back from Washington a bit and look through a different lens. Look at the outpouring of concern toward the Gulf region. Suddenly, it looks like 9/11 was just yesterday.
As I write this column, USA Today is reporting that the American Red Cross has raised more than $409 million for hurricane victims from private donations alone. These have come from people as diverse as the wealthy T. Boone Pickens and little schoolchildren busting open their piggy banks. Other charities are reporting contributions that exceed what they collected after 9/11, and that dwarf what came in after last winter's Asian tsunami.
The newspaper reports that kids are holding car washes, football teams are pledging proceeds from the sale of programs and other items and churches and other groups are holding bake sales all across the country. Right here in Utah, a volunteer hotline for hurricane relief received more than 7,000 calls in one week and had to shut down because officials said they had more than enough help. Hundreds more lined up to be trained as relief workers by the Red Cross, and the state was preparing for the possibility of receiving more victims for temporary shelter.
Meanwhile, New York firefighters headed to New Orleans to repay the help New Orleans provided them on 9/11.
A lot of Americans seem to understand that the best way to heal from a tragedy is to help others. It's a surefire plan for emerging intact from the tragedy of New Orleans.
It's heartening, really. Even if we have our political differences, even if the government isn't always there as efficiently as it ought to be and if our representatives keep jockeying for political advantage, Americans are still united. They still consider a tragedy anywhere in the land to be a family matter. Four years ago today — has it really been that long?
Jay Evensen is editor of the Deseret Morning News editorial page. E-mail: even@desnews.com