After the attacks on the World Trade Center, Americans – and particularly New Yorkers – were told that we needed to go about our lives as we normally would to demonstrate to the terrorists that they hadn’t won.
Shop, officials told us. Go out to eat. Travel. As our mayor then, Rudy Giuliani, said in a speech to the United Nations a few weeks after the attacks:
“For individuals, the most effective course of action they can take to aid our recovery is to be determined to go ahead with their lives. We can’t let terrorists change the way we live. Otherwise, they will have succeeded. In some ways, the resilience of life in New York City is the ultimate sign of defiance to terrorists.”
Their goal was to scare us and change us. We had to show them that neither had happened. We had to show them.
A couple of weeks after the attack, I went to dinner at a restaurant in the Meatpacking District, just a mile or two from ground zero, where the massive mound of rubble where the twin towers once stood was still simmering. You could smell the metal in the air.