Twenty-five years ago, I stood at Ground Zero and reported on what terrorism had done to New York City.
Twenty-five years later, I returned to the World Trade Center site.
As I walked the streets of New York with my family toward the memorial, I wondered how I would react.
I thought I might cry.
I thought I might break down.
And when the site finally came into view, I wobbled a little.
For a moment, I was back at Ground Zero.
And then, I was struck by something I didn’t expect.
It was sanitized.
The site is beautiful. The reflecting pools mark the footprints of the Twin Towers. The names of those who died that day are etched in bronze. And they deserve that dignity. But walking through the outdoor memorial, I couldn’t escape the feeling that something was missing.
The Ground Zero I remember was completely gone.
The violence and brutality was gone too.
And that made me sad.
Even a little angry.
My mind remembers the hulking structure, impaled into the ground. The twisted steel and shattered concrete. The smoldering fires. Firefighters digging through a mountain of wreckage and rescue dogs covering the heap.
Twisted steel. Crushed vehicles. Office furniture entangled in the debris. Buildings scarred. Dust covering everything.
And the flyers.
Thousands of them seemed to cover everything — walls, light poles, dumpsters, windows — put there by families desperately hoping someone they loved had somehow survived.
It was a crime scene.
America had been attacked.
The Twin Towers didn’t simply fall.
Terrorists hijacked passenger jets filled with innocent people and deliberately flew them into buildings filled with thousands more.
That brutality matters to the history.
If you walk the outside memorial today you do not see one bit of destruction from that day.
A memorial should provide dignity.
But history also requires honesty.
There ought to be something that confronts you with the scale of the destruction — something that makes a teenager born years after September 11th understand why this place shook America to its core.
Because I saw Ground Zero then.
And I see it now.
What stands outside today is peaceful, beautiful and respectful.
September 11th wasn’t peaceful.
It wasn’t beautiful.
And the terrorists were not respectful.
Like a criminal who wipes a crime scene clean of evidence and avoids arrest, it seems to me the 9/11 terrorists accomplished something similar. Only we wiped the crime scene clean. We sanitized it.
I will never let the terrorists off the hook.
But 25 years later, I fear we already have.
Never Forget.
Postscript: To truly understand what happened here, you need to go below ground, into the 9/11 Memorial Museum.
That’s where much of the physical evidence remains. That’s where the story becomes more than names carved into bronze.
That’s where you can see what terrorism actually did here.
And I should have visited the museum. But I didn’t.
I don’t think I could have made it through without breaking down.
Maybe someday I will.
