Something To Talk About

Anyone who has had even the most remote brush with the media knows that 9/11 is coming upon us very rapidly now. Until ten years ago the significance of this date was pretty much a non-event, except for those of us with birthdays on the 11th, like myself.

In 1964 when I was reading the backs of some of my baseball cards I noticed that Larry Bearnarth, a relief pitcher for the hapless New York Mets, shared the same birthday as I. I was turning 12 and he was turning 23. The Mets, a new club that became part of the National League the year before, were embarrassingly bad, and it must have been tough to be a pitcher on a team whose claim to fame was playing in New York, along with being the losingest team in baseball.

Larry grew up in New York, in a city where there were no "twin towers." And when the Mets came along, and later when they became amazing, there were still no twin towers. In fact, it wasn't until 1973 that the official seven-building World Trade Center complex officially opened with its 13.4 million square feet of primo office space. (Think of all that rent!) Considering all the architectural wonders in Europe that have lived through centuries of war and weather, this building complex is almost like a child that dies in its infancy. It never reached its 30th birthday.

So with the tenth year anniversary of "the infamous" 9/11 approaching we're seeing lots of magazines beginning to re-visit this event, its impact and its significance. Here are a couple stories that seemed worth sharing. The first is from the India Times, an article about the bullying and abuse directed toward Muslim and Sikh youth in American schools after the 9/11 attacks. The second is a review of Jason Burke's The 9/11 Wars, which summarizes the impact of the ten years that followed in the wake of that disastrous day. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that a lot of journalists used Burke's book as a resource for fresh insights on the seemingly unrelated but interconnected events of these past years.

Meantime, life goes on....