The following is a piece I have updated that originally appeared in the Beacon for the observance of Sept. 11 day in 2008. When you had lived on little Manhattan island in New York City for as many years as I did, the World Trade Center became like your second country home. You arrived there at one of the subway stops in Chambers Street, near the still-in-business 18th Century Fraunces Tavern where General Washington held his victory party after the War of Independence and where he ate his favorite period chicken pie still served there in its exact recipe.  You would be surrounded as you usually are on the streets of Manhattan by tens of thousands of people.

But then, as you moved from the 18th Century streets of the Fraunces Tavern and up the 20th Century World Trade Center, you begin to see the population dispersal of a country home.   Those tens of thousands of people on the sidewalks would disperse among spacious lobbies the higher they moved up.  This was the way of New Yorkers through their history on little Manhattan island, to find more space for themselves by building more workplaces and homes higher into the sky.

And so the five buildings and the two towers of the World Trade Center served as a kind of suburban village of about 50,000 people within a city of millions.  Even the air on top of the open-air observatory tower smelled and felt more like country oxygen than that metropolitan air you smelled and felt below on the streets.

I remember two images in particular about the World Trade Center.  The first impression was the massive mural greeting for visitors by the great artist Marc Chagall. The mural was a celebration of peace.  Perhaps Chagall is best known for his depiction of floating fiddlers and musicians from the culture of Jewish shtetles of his family roots.

My second impression was of a young hostess who had served me at the Windows on the World restaurant when I was interviewing the actor Sterling Hayden for a newspaper story.  Just to refresh, Hayden was that corrupt New York cop whom Al Pacino whacked while Hayden was eating at his favorite restaurant in “The Godfather.”   At my interview Hayden just kept drinking beer and lamenting about what a “coward” he was for informing on fellow Hollywood figures in front of Senator Joe McCarthy about thirty years earlier.

As the drinking and lamenting went on from lunch toward dinner, I was beginning to think Al Pacino may have been right for doing something about Hayden and his dinner-table habits.  This was especially true when Hayden began rolling marijuana at the table.  “I was such a coward,” he kept repeating, interminably.  Then, when we finally got out of our table, our hostess met us at the exit,

“Thank you,” she said to the old performer, “for being Sterling Hayden.”

In the year 2000, the Windows on the World on top of Tower One was the top grossing restaurant in America with nearly $38 million in revenues.  On September 11, 2001, over 150 staff and breakfasts guests at the restaurant were trapped and killed when the hijacked airliner crashed into the floors below them.

I found all the people at the Windows on the World to have been truly the best restaurant people I have ever seen.  But it wasn’t just them and our country that the World Trade was about.  It was about scores of countries with the best of all people around the world inhabiting its offices.  It was like a business version of an Olympics Games in there.

Because I spent so much time with these people through the years, it’s hard for me to go long without thinking of them making their last cell phone calls to the people they chose to be their last listeners.   Maybe I am emotional in a very strange way, but I feel they were trying to get out their messages to all of us.

1993:  The first WTC attack

It may be hard to believe now, but when the Al Queda first attacked the World Trade Center on February 26, 1993, killing six people and nearly killing tens of thousands of others, there was a major effort to place the crime locally rather than internationally.  Over 1,500 pounds of explosives were set off in the basement of Tower One in an effort to dislocate that building and topple it into Tower Two.  Attorney General Janet Reno and her associates always presented the six convicted Islamic radicals who plotted that bombing as an isolated Americanized group.  The terrorists never looked very Americanized to me.  But by containing the bombing to a description of an American crime rather than an attack on America, the newly sworn-in Clinton administration avoided anything that looked like a real international problem.

But Osama bin Laden was a young man and he didn’t mind waiting eight more years to get it right.  Once again, he waited until a new American president was just getting organized into the job, with all sorts of partisan job changes going on in U.S. justice and security departments that would make American most vulnerable to an attack.  Indeed, everyone in the Bush administration who had to react to 9/11 was at that time still training into a new job along with the new president.  And then Bin Laden did something that was much more terrible.

Now we are coming up to Sept. 11, 2009. another eight years after a Bin Laden attack on America.

Having Bin Laden in Pakistan with all of his fantasies about destroying America working around him and all of Pakistan’s nuclear bombs in reach is much worse than sheltering a pyromaniac in a match factory.  America has personally searched for him everywhere but Pakistan, and somehow earlier last year when one of our missiles landed in Pakistan it hit Bin Laden’s number-three man right on top of his head.

Perhaps that incident may have disturbed Bin Laden at last.  He has been going on without interruption to his routine in his safe Pakistan haven for years now.  He has no need to drive anywhere, or to earn his keep, or even cook his meals.  He has cells of Islamic radicals who are vying to do everything for him so that he is free to do nothing but kill Americans in as terrible a way as possible.  Truly Americans for Bin Laden are what Jews were for Hitler.

With all of his seclusion, though, Bin Laden has told us some important things about himself.  He takes action on ceremonial dates.  He struck within months of two new American presidents, and a new American president has now been sworn in this year.  His last attack commemorated the Camp David peace treated put together by President Carter, but that was then.  Bin Laden takes special care that each of his new attacks will vastly out magnify his last act.  This time, he will have a psychic need to use some much greater force against Americans and among more American populations.  If Bin Laden were only to be put out of the picture, this whole scene would change, just as if Hitler had only been killed by a good American OSS agent in the 1930′s, there would have been no one else in Europe who was such a unique lunatic to stage the Holocaust.  Do something, Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

Chris Sharp- Commentary

Chris Sharp is an Educator and a prize-winning professional writer. His commentaries represent his own opinions and not necessarily the views of any organization he may be affiliated with or those of the West Ranch Beacon.