Thoughts on 20th Anniversary of 9/11 - 2021

Been watching 9/11 documentaries yesterday and today. One was specifically about the building of the Towers and the motivation and thought behind their construction to boast of America's greatness. Some of the details were amazingly prophetic - years before the Twin Towers were even built and right afterwards... foreshadowing what was to come... When they first opened, the public was actually afraid of them - and in hindsight rightly so - but soon overcame their fear and embraced them and all they represented...

Even before they were built, though, critics derided the Buck Rogers quality of the towers, noting that new technologies and new architectural paradigms often bring new vulnerabilities. Ada Louise Huxtable, then the architecture critic at The New York Times, publicly aired her doubts in 1966. ''Who's afraid of the big, bad buildings?'' she wrote. ''Everyone, because there are so many things about gigantism that we just don't know. The gamble of triumph or tragedy at this scale -- and ultimately it is a gamble -- demands an extraordinary payoff. The trade-center towers could be the start of a new skyscraper age or the biggest tombstones in the world.''  In the end, they were both... (Taken from NY Times Magazine article)

An ad was taken out in May 1968 about the dangers of such extremely tall towers and was put out by Lawrence Wien, the owner of the Empire State Building who was ticked about losing his "position" of owning the tallest building in the world at that time. As it turns out, the position of plane in his ad is exactly the location of the plane that hit on 9/11 - compare it to actual photos taken that day... Even when Phillipe Pettit did a surprise and illegal tightrope walk in 1974 the now infamous silhouette of a jet is there in the background...

The Twin Tower were America's "Towers of Babel" ( "Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves" - Genesis 11)

The Twin Towers became America's "Titanic"...

National hubris that led to national tragedy...

Let us remember those lost today and take time to repent - recognizing the blessings we've enjoyed as a nation are not due to our goodness and might but only due to God's mercy and love...

We need to recognize this and turn back to Him with our whole heart...