I don't dispute the feelings of the people who had loved ones who died.
No matter if they cashed in or not, those feelings of loss are real, and those people are entitled to them.
Anybody else - the media, the politicians, anybody who stands to gain anything from milking the event needs to just stop.
The site is now a construction site. It is not hallowed ground. If every piece of land in New York City where somebody died were declared hallowed ground, the entire city would grind to a wrenching halt. There is nothing hallowed about a place where people died. It's a bad memory and nothing else. Move on. It's over. Treasure the memories, but don't impose your reality on the rest of us. Keep it private and precious. The public-ness of it cheapens it.
I was here on that day. I was on the morning show at Q 104.3, the classic rock station at 6th Avenue and 47th Street. We always had the TV monitor on all the time and we happened to have it on Fox 5, which was the first station to report that a small plane had hit the first tower.
Since I was the newsman, I was one of the first to report what I saw, even before before the news hit the wires. After that we took calls and I broadcast the latest bulletins as they came in. Some of the calls were heartbreaking. People who had family or friends who worked in the towers. People who couldn't reach other people were using us, trying to get a message out to them.
At about 4 pm Clear Channel decided to just run the audio from NBC news. That's when I finally headed home to Brooklyn. By then the subways were running, and I got home to Laurie who had been worried sick. I also realized that my family hadn't been able to call because the circuits were destroyed. But I was able to make some calls out to my frantic daughters who were understandably upset and worried. Then the phones crapped out completely, but the internet was still up and running, oddly enough. So, I was able to communicate to everyone.
We could see the smoke from the towers from our apartment in Park Slope. The smoke blew right over us and we had a layer of dust throughout our apartment. I often wondered what health effects that had on us. It's taken five years for them to admit to the health effects on the people who worked at the site and the residents of lower Manhattan. What about us? We were in the direct line of the smoke. We could smell it. We could see the dust. We even saw paper that floated over from the WTC.
It's very hard to describe the feelings from that day. I don't think anyone who wasn't here can truly relate. It's still very upsetting to me, and I don't think that rawness will ever end. I was never really afraid or fearful. But the sense of vulnerability, the feeling that it could have been me who died because of some random act, is even more unsettling at a base level I've never experienced before or since. I sensed that I could die and that I could die in the next instant from something, some belief system, some group of people who wanted to kill me, not personally, but as part of a giant perceived evil. I can't describe it. I can't do it justice. It's just there now. It will always be there. I treasure and also dread those feelings, part of who I am and will be forever.