I Can Not and Will Not Forget ...
September 11, 2001
May we while never forgetting redouble our efforts to rid the world of fanaticism and violence and fill it with compassion and thoughtfulness!
I still feel that gaping hole in lower Manhattan. When I'm there, it makes me nervous when I can see the sky at the end of streets where the towers had always blocked it. It makes me afraid when the sun shines where there was perpetual shadow. Yes, that was all part of being a New Yorker.
Part of being a Berliner was watching live television images of the destruction eight years ago of those "landmarks" I shopped, ate, played, toured, flirted, laughed, strolled in and then a couple of days later attending a mammoth demonstration of solidarity with the United States and the victims from all around the world at the Brandenburg Gate. No one had any question that such violence is to be condemned, all hoped the response would be reasonable and de-escalatory.
Part of being a human was to witness many politicians take bombs to fight suicide bombers who were dead, but is also to consider that those who radically seek to be thought and moral police, who wage war against those who think differently, who get mad when others have fun, may have destroyed those buildings,
BUT
they can never make them never have been!
They cannot destroy their existence. I am the World Trade Center, too, as long as I live and think.
Let us commemorate - remember together - what will never be able not to have been and ensure with consideration, upholding our rights and ideals peacefully, that no more must die for religious, ideological, political fundamentalism or fanaticism.
I still feel that gaping hole in lower Manhattan. When I'm there, it makes me nervous when I can see the sky at the end of streets where the towers had always blocked it. It makes me afraid when the sun shines where there was perpetual shadow. Yes, that was all part of being a New Yorker.
Part of being a Berliner was watching live television images of the destruction eight years ago of those "landmarks" I shopped, ate, played, toured, flirted, laughed, strolled in and then a couple of days later attending a mammoth demonstration of solidarity with the United States and the victims from all around the world at the Brandenburg Gate. No one had any question that such violence is to be condemned, all hoped the response would be reasonable and de-escalatory.
Part of being a human was to witness many politicians take bombs to fight suicide bombers who were dead, but is also to consider that those who radically seek to be thought and moral police, who wage war against those who think differently, who get mad when others have fun, may have destroyed those buildings,
BUT
they can never make them never have been!
They cannot destroy their existence. I am the World Trade Center, too, as long as I live and think.
Let us commemorate - remember together - what will never be able not to have been and ensure with consideration, upholding our rights and ideals peacefully, that no more must die for religious, ideological, political fundamentalism or fanaticism.
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