Here's AFSCME's poignant video about that day. The New York Times posts a slide show of the workers (including Teamsters) now rebuilding the World Trade Center site. (Hat tip to American Rights at Work.)
Teamsters who worked on the pile marched in New York's Labor Day parade this weekend. Reports the Associated Press,
Before entering St. Patrick's, the seat of the city's Catholic archdiocese, truck driver and Teamsters union member Mark Vigilante recalled hauling debris from the trade center site after the terror attack.
"I saw an arrow pointed down that said 'body' — it was a firefighter found," said Vigilante, of West Babylon, Long Island, who spent a dozen hours a day trucking trade center debris to New Jersey in the weeks after the attack.
He was at ground zero when the remains of his friend were found — firefighter Thomas Kennedy, one of seven members of Ladder Co. 101 in Brooklyn's Red Hook neighborhood.
He was among 343 firefighters killed in the 9/11 attacks.
About 800 members of Teamsters Local 282 — 44-year-old Vigilante is a member — drove trucks that hauled debris from the site.
"Destruction was in our hearts and minds," said Vigilante. "But now, life has to go on, we've got to move on."And here's a perceptive essay from the British Independent about what we've lost in the past decade:
In these 10 years America has lost much, in terms of lives, treasure and reputation. Most of all, perhaps, it has lost its illusions. One, that its home territory was invulnerable, beyond the reach of hostile foreigners, vanished on that terrible Tuesday morning. But a decade on, another no less cherished illusion has disappeared as well: the certainty that whatever happened in the world beyond, America was a place of infinite opportunity and ever-growing prosperity.Read the whole thing here.
