I think, regardless of whatever "truth" you believe about how 9/11 came about, it's probably just worth focusing on the 3,000 people who died and the thousands more who've died since from cancers and other infections brought on by being near Ground Zero. In the end, it doesn't matter who brought about their deaths, it is still the single most devastating loss of life in a single non-natural event in human history. Whether it was a conspiracy or a cover-up or neither of those things, the world was forever changed by it, except for the worlds of the people who just went to work that morning like millions of others worldwide and didn't come home.
For what it's worth, I believe 99% of the official version of events. I believe 19 Al Qaeda terrorists conspired together to fly four planes into four buildings and kill as many people as they possibly could. But, as I said before, I don't think the "Who?" of it all matters much when weighed up against the loss of life. Innocent people were slaughtered on a mass scale in a truly incomprehensible event that we'll probably never recover from as a global society, such were its wide-reaching and irreversible impacts. A day that contained every extreme of humanity's potential for great bravery and nobility but also for great treachery and evil.
The people I think of most are the ones trapped in the towers, who were simultaneously waiting to be rescued and waiting for the end. Leaning out of windows hundreds of feet into the air, so desperate were they for air. Some of them staring into the flames and deciding suicide was the only alternative. Listen to the phone call made by Kevin Cosgrove if you can. The people who held hands as they jumped together, the people between the 93rd and 99th floors of the North Tower for whom 9/11 never really happened; they were just killed in a plane crash at work and that was that. A haunting and dark day that I've become obsessed with over the years, in truth, because of all it contains.
Hard to believe we're almost a quarter of a century on. How the hell do you explain it to today's kids? How do you get them to wrap their minds around not only the scale of tragedy but also the symbolic terror of it all. Because not only did it change the world in an instant, it also brought about the true end of the 20th century and gave us the world as we've known it ever since. I don't know if a similar event could have such an impact ever again. Can it be compared to anything previously in history? I think it stands entirely alone as an event. An awful, awful event that can't - and still hasn't - been put into words.
