There are a lot of 9/11 retrospective videos coming out this week. Here's one that was actually made in 2001, put together by the AFL-CIO at that time to honor the efforts of union members. Looking back at that moment, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka writes that:
Doors opened within us to each other. We came together. We flew the flag. We comforted one another. In our grief, we found the best in ourselves.
What an overwhelming sense of unity we shared, all across our nation. And it was this unity that allowed us to begin healing and rebuilding. There is no time in my memory of a more proud example of what we can accomplish when we work together. Solidarity, the cornerstone of the union movement, flowed through all of us and carried us through.
But other doors opened, too—doors to hate, suspicion of “others” and self-centered greed. Our fear was twisted into something much more dangerous.
The unity that had helped us survive faded as divisiveness took root. I look around today in amazement at just how far apart our nation has become—the endless possibilities that came with our unity have all but vanished.
Just 10 years after 9/11, despite our vows, the public servants, construction workers and others who lost their lives or still suffer with the cancerous remnants of the Twin Towers haven’t just been forgotten. They’ve been vilified. The extremist small government posse has turned them into public enemy No. 1, as though teachers and firefighters, EMTs and nurses and union construction workers ruined America’s economy.
Listening to the best of that time, when so many people showed courage and came together, and thinking about how the 9/11 attacks were used to divide us and how those same forces of division have continued to change our society for the worse, reveals another deep tragedy that 9/11 inflicted on us all, no matter how far from the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and the field in Pennsylvania we all were.