9/11 stories of strength

IN THIS newspaper’s Spectrum magazine today you will find stories from the survivors of 9/11 that will move the hardest of hearts. From the widow struggling to avoid being defined by her loss to the office worker whose friends and colleagues didn’t make it, they are human stories of great loss and great pain. But they are also stories of how, in the face of the cruelest circumstances, human dignity and decency is capable of not only surviving, but flowering. If we are able to put aside, just for a moment, the legitimate political debate about the wars that followed 9/11, these stories from the people caught up on the day itself are a moving testament to the best in humanity.

But 9/11 is not just a story about people, it is the story of a city. Although there was also an attack on the Pentagon in Washington DC, and another hijacked plane that was downed in Pennsylvania, it is the destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York that has come to define the events of that day.

Ten years on, the way the world’s most iconic city has dealt with the atrocity shows the human spirit at its most generous. Over the past decade New York has seen many tens of thousands of Muslims join the city’s cultural mix. And yet this is a city where difference and diversity is not just accepted and tolerated, but is celebrated as a defining characteristic. New York’s skyline was indelibly altered by 9/11, but its spirit only grew stronger.