“…almost everywhere you looked, [people were] reverting to ancient, pure and decidedly gender-stereotyping form…Women…ministered to the sick, consoled the grief-struck and looked on, with worshipful sidelong glances, in wonder at the men.
“And ohhhh, what men they were, and are.
“They were unyielding, and yet not stupidly stoic; I cannot count the number of times I saw firemen or police officers wrap their arms around one another or clamp big hands to one another’s shoulders, and often saw tears behind goggles and once or twice streaming down grime-covered cheeks.
“They were affectionate and tender with each other, but strong and fierce in their resolve….The men were quiet and shy but willing to speak and never inarticulate and occasionally near-poetic (Why do firemen rush into buildings? I asked one captain outside the little midtown station that is home to Engine Co. No. 8 and Ladder No. 2 of the 8th Battery and where 10 of the 50 men were lost. “Who knows?” he replied with a weary little smile. ‘It’s a secret.’)
“The raw physical courage of all those who had raced to the scene and headed into the very towers that they, of all people, with their knowledge of structures and the sort of damage that a fireball could inflict upon skyscrapers, would best know were at risk of collapse, was enormous; their collective selflessness, putting women, children and civilians before themselves, utterly astonishing.”
The best article I’ve seen about September 11 and the events surrounding it is Canadian writer Christie Blatchford’s stunning National Post column “This Triumph of the Spirit Belongs to Men” (9/21/01).
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This Triumph of the Spirit Belongs to Men
By Christie Blatchford
National Post, 9/21/01
Ten days ago (September 11), on a Tuesday morning that dawned in New York City bright and lovely everywhere but within a small area of the southernmost tip of Manhattan, my Toronto Star friend Rosie DiManno and I were walking out of ground zero, as America’s largest crime scene is called.
We had been inside it for six or seven hours, and were heading up Church Street in the Con Edison hard hats a detective from a suburban New York police department had handed us and with the tatty used paper masks we had picked out of the rubble and donned earlier now around our necks. Rosie’s running shoes were sodden and her soles blistering; my feet mud-streaked in the open-toed, high-heeled sandals I had cunningly chosen to take with me.
Above us, the sky was as clearly delineated as good and evil: Black and poisonous over the fallen World Trade Center and environs, cloudless and blue just a little to the north.
As we approached the first barricade, beyond which to our huge delight we saw some of our press colleagues (including at least one of our competitors from Toronto) stranded and waiting to greet us, we passed a line of firemen, all of them sooty and exhausted, who were trudging straight back into what seemed to us the very heart of darkness.
Rosie came to a dead stop as they passed; I swear my mouth actually fell open. One of them had a face like an angel.
“Did you see that?” she asked.
I had, of course, and cite the young fellow as my lust-filled illustration of the secret untold story that is the tale of the Twin Towers and the Sept. 11 horror — that this one, this wonderful triumph of the human spirit, belongs squarely to men. (more…)
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