Hole in the world - YouTube comment

 All I have to do is say Alexa, play there’s a hole in the world tonight… and she does. The miracles of technology have brought so much good into our world. So much comfort and convenience for so many of us. And yet here we are in 2022, eleven years after 9/11… I was at work at my job in South Carolina, I went into the canteen to watch the news on a tiny tv. My Mom and my sister were in New Jersey, just across the river, my niece at NYU. They could hear the explosions, they could see and smell the smoke. I didn’t call them… I went home and watched the planes crushing into the sides of the World Trade Center over and over and over again. I guess I didn’t believe it. I guess I couldn’t believe it. The next day the security guard stopped me from entering the building. He held me until another workmate verified who I was… I had been working there 10 years. I flew home to New Jersey for Thanksgiving. I felt an odd sense of safety thinking that the worst had already happened. When I got to  Newark the halls were lined with soldiers on duty. Each face held a strangers grimace. My sister and I went into The City. I had been telling myself that nothing had changed… we were in the crush of the crowd at the Tickets outlet on Broadway. A woman looked at me and said We are part of a community. Yes, we are all part of the community. Somehow we felt closer, sharing a bond of fear and disbelief. We walked past fire departments and said thank you to the firemen we met. We walked the streets of New York City much the way we had many times before but… but it was different… We were different… America was different. Instead of pulling us together, as I most certainly felt as that woman had said, instead of growing in that feeling of being one American community there were those of us who felt divided. There’s a hole in the world tonight… at once the most penitent and profoundly sad song so beautifully rendered by The Eagles. There remains a hole in the heart of America today. Technology continues to advance and offers so much promise of bringing us together yet our hearts remain hard and divided. In many ways we’ve never recovered from the horrors of 911.