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Part II Reading Task Text A
In the days following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Daily News staff writer Corky Siemaszko wrote several snapshots of the city's mood at the time. Siemaszko offered similar snapshot son the first few anniversaries of the attacks. Here we present a selection from the series. Snapshots of New York’s Mood after 9/11 Corky Siemaszko DAY OF TERROR
Originally published: 9/12/2001
The morning coffee was still cooling when our grandest illusion was shattered. Within minutes, one of New York's mightiest symbols was a smoldering mess and the nation's image of invincibility was made a lie.
As the World Trade Center crumpled and the streets filled with screams and scenes of unimaginable horror, choking smoke blotted out the sun and plunged lower Manhattan into darkness.
Those not entombed by the bomb-blasted buildings ran and ran —just as they did eight years earlier, when another terror attack shook this mighty symbol of America's power.
For the rest of the country, there was another shock to digest —a second kamikaze attack. This time on the Pentagon.
More horror. More chaos. More amazement that the mighty United States could be so vulnerable to terror.
But on the streets of lower Manhattan there was no time for finger-pointing. No time for talk of revenge. People were dying. Cops and firefighters were dying with them.
Commentators called the attack a second Pearl Harbor, until now our most tragic hour. Politicians denounced the likely culprits in Afghanistan. And before dusk, there were inaccurate reports that an angry America was raining revenge on Kabul.
One day we will think back on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, and remember in crystal detail what we were doing when the first plane crashed into the north tower at 8:45 a. m. And we will be amazed that we didn't think it possible before. THE DAY AFTER
Originally published: 9/13/2001
When the sun rose yesterday, someone joked that the city was missing its two front teeth. But there was nothing to laugh about in the aftermath of our generation's Pearl Harbor.
There was only wreckage and smoke and fire where the World Trade Center used to be. Thousands remained buried under tons of rubble.
A handful of people were plucked from the wreckage in lower Manhattan, living reminders that miracles do happen.
But for those digging through the debris, every passing hour sapped their strength hand their hopes of finding more victims alive.
The rest of New York resembled a Third World capital after a particularly explosive coup. Armed National Guardsmen in helmets and camouflage rumbled through Manhattan in convoys. The few people on the normally bustling streets watched them and only sometimes waved. New Yorkers waited at newsstands for the morning papers to arrive while anxious relatives gathered at street side morgues holding pictures of the disappeared.
In Washington, where the kamikaze terrorists severely damaged the nerve center of American
military power, politicians beat war drums as our allies pledged solidarity and registered their disgust.
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Investigators pointed fingers at the likely culprit in Afghanistan and began rounding up the suicide bombers' suspected accomplices. The faces of the fanatics began to emerge.
They had jolted America with their surprise attack. But now — as after Pearl Harbor more than half a century before —it was our turn.
And the world waited to see what America would do. LOOKING BACK IN PAIN & HOPE Originally published: 9/8/2002
Long before the Boeings brought down the towers, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote \with the revolving year. ”So it is with New York.
The time it took the Earth to circle the sun was time enough to clear the wreckage, but not enough to fade the memory of what happened there.
It was time enough to bury the bodies that could be found, but not enough to truly mourn the thousands who perished.
It was time enough to plan memorials,but not enough to fill the gaping wound in lower Manhattan. For what is a year but a thin sliver of history, a beat of a hummingbird's wing?
And yet, in the space of 12 months, the wounded city rose from its knees, angry America smote the Taliban and sent Osama Bin Laden into hiding.
A new generation of firefighters and cops tried to fill the shoes of those who were lost, a new generation of orphans faced a future uncertain.
New Yorkers talked tough and carried on, but with far less swagger and far less joy. They remained haunted by what they had lived through, what they had seen.
How could they not? Ground Zero is just a subway ride away. Everyone, it seems, knows someone who did not come home Sept. 11. Everyone, it seems, was touched by the tragedy.
There were indelible images that captured the carnage like flies in amber —the planes crashing, the towers on fire, the falling men and women frozen in flight as they leaped to their deaths.
Now the calendar commands us to revisit Sept. 11. Now the calendar commands us to remember the dead. Now the calendar commands us to pick at a scab that has just begun to heal.
But the calendar does not say how many more times the Earth has to revolve around the sun before it stops hurting. ONE YEAR LATER
Originally published: 9/12/2002
On a day that broke as blue and beautiful as the morning a year ago when the planes toppled the towers, a brisk northwest wind kicked up the dust of Ground Zero. It coated the red roses that children carried into The Pit.
It stung the eyes and clung to the tears of the broken hearted who came to say farewell.
It swirled like dervishes across the vast emptiness where the World Trade Center once stood. Some of the mourners divined in the dust the ghosts of those they lost, and they opened their mouths and breathed it in.
Some of the mourners saw in the dust visions from that deadly day when the very ground was on fire and the powder and smoke caked the living and the dead.
Some of the mourners who never got a body to bury gathered handfuls of the brown dust and
placed it in plastic bags to save and remember, to always remember.
We will not revisit Sept. 11 the same way again. The ranks of the 24, 000 who followed the bagpipers and drummers down the ramp and into the emptiness yesterday will thin. Fewer Americans will stop in their tracks at 8:46 a. m. and register the moment When the first hijacked plane crashed into the north tower. Fewer candles will be lit. Fewer flags will be waved. Fewer speeches will be made. Fewer songs will be sung. Fewer tears will be shed, at least publicly. Instead, something new will fill the void where the towers stood. Something new will be built on the spot as a memorial to the 2, 801 who died. Something new will rise on the sacred 16 acres to spite the madmen who dared attack us. Poet Jean de La Fontaine wrote, “On the wings of time grief flies away. ”But the memory, like the dust, will linger.