Portraits of Grief from 9/11 - and my Declaration of Hope from that day.

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Portraits of Grief from 9/11 - and my Declaration of Hope from that day.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/us/po...of-grief/0

This is an interactive feature. You have access to the stories of those lost that can be found alphabetically.

"Three days after the September 11 attacks, reporters at The New York Times, armed with stacks of homemade missing-persons fliers, began interviewing friends and relatives of the missing and writing brief portraits of their lives to create “Portraits of Grief.” Not meant to be obituaries in any traditional sense, they were informal and impressionistic, often centered on a single story or idiosyncratic detail. The archive below features the original portraits as well as links to updated stories on the families of those featured here."

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This country lost a lot when these people died.

IMHO they haven't been honored properly. Their deaths were cynically exploited to pass laws that gave the government unheard of powers to do gawd knows what. People were scared, and scared people can be stampeded into rash actions. It is still happening.

I believe that a lot of these people would be horrified at what has happened to this country. I don't think they would recognize it, and they would have a range of emotions about their deaths being used to justify many actions.

They will be honored properly when we are no longer a country of fear. This nation has to return to being a country of hope. In some of our other darkest hours, there was somebody who was willing to hold up a beacon no matter how small. By force of will and personality, they drew people to it, and that made this light grow.

Lincoln did it. FDR did it. Churchill was a master at it. JFK, MLK, and RFK did it. They may have acknowledged the rough roads ahead, but they raised their voices to the heavens to tell people that we could make it through. In addition, they emphasized that we must make it through TOGETHER.

These leaders knew privately how dire circumstances were. However, they publicly refused to acknowledge that anything couldn't ultimately be defeated. They knew how powerful the psychologically of hope was. They also knew the power of fear. By sheer force of their personalities, they beat back that fear at every turn. It wasn't done by promising rainbows and ponies, but by showing an unbreakable faith in what we had overcome and could always overcome.

I haven't listed nearly the many people who have held up beacons of hope and continue to do so. There is still an unbroken line of people with this spirit from the beginning of this nation until now. That is the line that must NEVER be stopped.

Those that gave their lives on 9/11 will truly be honored when people hold their heads up and honor their lives. As long as people hold their heads down and acknowledge only their deaths and the terror, what these brave souls really were at heart will never be seen.

They are America. They are us. We can look at how they lived and once more see the patchwork of life that is the spirit of this nation.
Grieving is normal and needed, but so is an acknowledgment of their worth that can be manifested by shining a bright light on the good we should aspire to that was a part of them.

I haven't yet heard a loud voice from any 'leader' with a bully pulpit trying to beat back the fear. The president may have the biggest, but he is not the only one with a place that will echo a message of hope. It seems that they want to multiply the fear instead for their own ends.

I believe that in this case, WE must be that voice. There are many people from the spectrum who would add theirs if only they didn't feel so alone and hopeless. It isn't a political voice of divisiveness, but a true American voice that binds us together with this proclamation that began our great experiment:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."



:patriot: