OPINION:
Lost in most 9/11 memorials year after year is what could have been.
If Sept. 11, 2001, had not been the first day of school and an election day, there would have been 25,000 or more people in the floors above the impacts.
Full buildings were the case eight years earlier, when truck bombers hit. It took three-and-a-half hours to evacuate. If the normal workforce had been in the World Trade Center buildings, it would have been impossible to evacuate the lower floors through three stairwells before the towers collapsed.
I have seen realistic numbers that the loss of life could have been as high as 45,000 and but certainly would have broken 30,000. Tens of thousands owe their lives to the fact that the terrorists and the planners did not understand that morning.
The 9/11 terrorists hoped to do the damage Hamas did to Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The 1,200 murdered on that day in the Jewish state is the equivalent of about 40,000 in the U.S., a scale beyond American comprehension.
The harsh truth is that 25 years later, terrorists still want massive losses of life: Western, Jewish and Christian. So many in the West want to brush this aside, but nothing has really changed.
Life is not worth what it once was in the West. The most disturbing part of the Lindsay Clancy trial and the assassinations of Charlie Kirk and UnitedHealth care CEO Brian Thompson is the reactions of the public. Many openly defend cold-blooded killings and even celebrate the accused perpetrators.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York Democrat, laughing with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani at last week’s 9/11 memorial service shows just how disturbingly little those in positions of power apparently care about terrorism.
Is this the world we want to leave future generations?
JAMES BARENDS
Wayne, Pennsylvania
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