A little earlier, I was having coffee downtown with my sister Joan, and we talked, among other thigns, about 9/11 and how that date still haunts us all. It is certainly a day every year when our country remembers the people who died in the attacks that day and the policemen and firemen and rescue workers that were the heroes that day, and it's right that we do that. But, as we were chatting and I was thinking, it was also a day when a lot of people were heroes: the people who just went to work that day, as stockbrokers, secretaries, clerks, restaurant workers, maintenance people, and were just normally doing their jobs that day.
We never heard much coverage that day about how New Yorkers found ways to get home to their families even though mass transit was paralyzed and communication was disrupted and nobody knew for sure what was going on. Or how about all those people in airplanes in flight across the country that had to be landed at the nearest airports and were potentially stranded for days? The country could have descended into chaos that day, and it didn't. I think there were a lot of heroes, ordinary people, who were never recognized or acknowledged and that there were many stories that were never heard.
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