The Chances You Will Die From . . .

Sources:  Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; State Department:


Last year, 10 Americans were killed by international terrorism.

You are 262 times as likely to die in a fire.

You are 1,595 times as likely to be murdered.

You are 356 times as likely to die from drowning.

You are 416 times as likely to die from an injury at work.

You are 85 times as likely to die in a gun accident.

You are 2,626 times as likely to die in an alcohol-related accident.

You are 2,663 times as likely to die from a fall.

You are 4,024 times as likely to die from a drug overdose.

You are 3,468 times as likely to die in a car accident.


(Between September 11 and the death of Osama bin Laden, the United States spent $1.28 trillion prosecuting the war on terror.)

They Died In A Puff Of Smoke/Blown Away

Hard to imagine:

Absorbing the memories of lives that went up in smoke

October 21, 2012

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They died in a puff of smoke. One brief, billowing, black cloud against the bluest sky was the only visible evidence that something awful and monumental had just happened in Pennsylvania's Laurel Highlands that Tuesday morning 11 years ago.

A photograph of that puff of smoke, hovering like a malevolent storm cloud over a peaceful landscape of red barns and green pastures, was taken by someone living a mile and a half away minutes after the crash. It appears in one of the exhibits at the uncompleted Flight 93 National Memorial

The official entrance is off Route 30 between Bedford and Somerset, out in Western Pennsylvania where it's still called the Lincoln Highway. Unlike the crude, crushed-stone access road I used to visit the temporary memorial several times over the years, the new entrance evokes the terrible isolation of this anonymous place, a spent strip mine made sacred by the courage of Flight 93's passengers and crew. Its three miles of deliberate, serpentine curves reveal the natural beauty that surrounds the man-made desolation.

The site is devastating to behold, its starkness and solemnity leading inevitably to the question: What would we have done? If among those passengers forced to decide how they would die, where would we have been - on our feet or in our seats?

The consequences of that decision are illustrated by the memorial's brochure. On the front is a rendering of the memorial's white marble wall, displaying the names of 40 passengers and crew. On the back is a photograph of the U.S. Capitol, the terrorists' probable target, a mere 20 minutes away by plane.

I was expecting to be moved by the memorial, but I was not prepared to be blown away by a random series of interactions with people intimately connected to the events of 9/11.

The night before our visit, my wife and I went to eat at the Pine Grill in Somerset (recommended by the clerk at our motel, who raved, "The food tastes like food"). On the wall inside is a framed copy of the Sept. 12, 2001, edition of the local newspaper, the Daily American, with the front-page headlines "America Under Siege" and "Terror Touches Somerset County."

Sitting to my left at the counter was a young man named Jake Hayman and his father, Bob. We talked football for a bit, but I eventually got around to Flight 93. "Where were you that day?" I asked Bob.

"I was there," he said.

Hayman, a volunteer firefighter in Somerset (population 6,200), was at his job as a safety supervisor at the Snyder potato chip factory in nearby Berlin that morning. He and others were gathered around a television watching the news from New York when the call came to report to the crash site near Shanksville.

"There was nothing," Hayman said. "Hard to believe that there was an entire airplane that fit into a hole that small. There was this smoking crater and this awful smell."

The smell was from the thousands of gallons of fuel on a fully loaded jet bound for San Francisco, which hit the Earth nose first and upside-down at more than 560 m.p.h.

As we spoke, a woman who had been seated across the bar walked up to us and said, "I heard you talking about Flight 93. My mother was on that plane. She was the oldest passenger to die." Not knowing what to say, I introduced myself and Bob Hayman, telling her, "This man was one of the first responders that day." She immediately hugged him as if he were family.

The woman, Betsy Kemmerer, lives in the small Poconos town of Effort, more than 200 miles away. On Sept. 11, 2001, she had driven her 79-year-old mother, Hilda Marcin, from the North Jersey suburb they lived in to Newark International Airport for a flight to San Francisco, where she was going to stay with her other daughter. "Mom hated the East Coast winters," Kemmerer said.

The next morning, I saw Hilda Marcin's name etched in marble on the memorial wall, which points like an arrow to the crash site, marked by a boulder about 100 yards away. At the end of the wall is a rough-hewn wooden fence cut from the trunks of trees near the impact crater. Visitors could peer between the timbers at the boulder in the distance.

Nearby stood a gray-haired volunteer guide in a green National Park Service jacket. In his left hand, he held an umbrella; in his right, a plastic model of a Boeing 757. He demonstrated how a hijacker rocked the aircraft back and forth, gaining altitude and then diving suddenly to drive away the passengers storming the cockpit. Finally, as the passengers breached the door, the terrorist rolled the plane into a suicidal dive that ended the journey of the only hijacked aircraft that didn't reach its target that day.

he guide, too, had a personal story. He said he lives nearby and works for a government agency he couldn't name. He had arrived at the scene on the morning of Sept. 12 with a canvass team. The terrain was rough and covered with jagged debris. A few steps in, he stumbled, fell to his hands and knees, and noticed a shredded tree trunk a few feet away. Embedded in the bark was a credit card.

"Not until I read the official report on the Flight 93 investigation did I realize that I had found the credit card used by the hijackers to buy the tickets on that flight," he said. "That ended up being the beginning of the money trail connecting the terrorists."

Unbelievable, I thought, this sequence of random encounters. And yet, what could be more unbelievable than what we all saw with our own eyes that day?

On that raw, bleak, windswept October morning, in conditions that would keep most reasonable people inside, I counted 10 cars in the memorial parking lot with out-of-state plates - Michigan, Nebraska, Idaho, California. And on our way back to Route 30 along that winding road from oblivion, we saw a seemingly endless stream of headlights from at least 30 different cars, making their way slowly and reverently to this proud and shattered Pennsylvania field.

---

Clark DeLeon can be reached at deleonc88@aol.com.

Philadelphia Inquirer, Currents section, Sunday, October 21, 2012, Page D3

Signe Wilkinson Op-Ed "9/11's Long Shadows" Political Cartoon

9/11-Kids Made/Make A Difference-Poem "I Hold In My Hands"-Remember

               I Hold in My Hands

I hold in my hands ...
The dust.
The dust and wreckage of the towers.
Even though I wasn't there,
I can still feel it.
It has damaged my hands with dirt.
It has damaged my heart with sorrow.
It has damaged my body with fear,
and it has damaged my life with war.

I hold in my hands ...
My life.
My life could soon be filled with war,
cruelty at its worst.
Miles away, I can hear the planes' roaring engines, gliding through the air.

I hold in my hands ...
My future.
My life ahead.
Whether it will be filled with war or peace, we will not know.
My future keeps me going from dawn to dusk.

I hold in my hands ...
Hope.
Hope for the future.
Hope for peace.
Hope for my country's freedom.
And hope for America to win this war on terrorism.

Publisher :- Aaron Walsh

Aaron Walsh was in the sixth grade and wrote this on 9/11/2001.

September 6, 2011 Sixth-grader's 9/11 poem leads to unexpected bond By Cliff Radel cradel@enquirer.com She was an off-duty flight attendant from Oakley out for an evening stroll in Paris. He was a school kid in Delhi Township, a sixth-grader stuck in his morning social studies class. Then the planes slammed into the twin towers. And the world changed forever. The events of 9/11 eventually linked the lives of the flight attendant, Tanya Hoggard, and the student, Aaron Walsh. The tragedy showed them that one person can make a difference in helping good triumph over evil. And they decided, unbeknownst to each other, to spread the word. A month after the attacks, Walsh wrote a poem in his school notebook. Hoping to make sense of that horrible day in history, he began with the words: I hold in my hands ... The dust. The dust and wreckage of the towers. Even though I wasn't there, I can still feel it. It has damaged my hands with dirt. It has damaged my heart with sorrow. It has damaged my body with fear, and it has damaged my life with war. The poem wound up going around the world. That happened after it landed in Hoggard's hands. Thanks to her, Walsh's work came to rest in the collection of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. The memorial, located in the footprints of the World Trade Center, opens Sunday. The museum opens in 2012 on the 11th anniversary of 9/11. As Walsh wrote his poem in a Delhi Middle School classroom, Hoggard stood under a tent at Ground Zero. She was a volunteer on the chow line. She would fly to New York on her off-days - using 30 of them in three months - to serve meals to the workers sifting through the rubble. "I didn't go because of my job," she said, "or because flight attendants were killed on 9/11. I went because my job enabled me to go. I could fly in and out for free on the same day and help out." She set out just to feed firefighters performing the grim task of searching for body parts of lost brothers and sisters. By chance, she wound up rescuing - and donating to the 9/11 museum - 3½ tons of thank-you notes and sympathy cards. They came to Ground Zero and New York's firehouses from children around the world. Most of the messages began with: "Dear Hero." "Those notes helped the healing process at Ground Zero," Hoggard said. "The faces of the workers brightened when they read those messages. They would smile. Then they would go out the door to look for more remains. "They didn't wear masks," she added. "I asked one guy why. He said: 'You can't find somebody if you can't smell them.' "That's when I got it," she added. "They wanted to find their friends. They wanted to make a difference. So did I." She sat on her sofa and looked across at Walsh. Ten years later, she's still a flight attendant. He's gone from the sixth grade to his senior year at Miami University. The flight attendant and the zoology major met recently to reminisce and go over their plans to participate in Sunday's program at the Cincinnati Museum Center at Union Terminal. She will talk about her "Dear Hero" collection. He will conclude the program by reading his poem. They talked about where they were that September day in 2001 when the world changed. Hoggard was going for a walk in Paris "when a Delta pilot came running up and said: 'Our country is under attack!' " Walsh came into social studies class that morning and saw the TV on, "which was rare. We saw one of the towers go down." At the end of the recollections, a stillness filled the room. Walsh broke the silence. "I have so much gratitude for Tanya," he said. Clutching his sixth-grade composition book, he used his thumb to mark the place of his pencil-written poem. "She actually made a difference. I'm just a very small part of this story." She frowned and shook her head. He ignored her. "I still can't wrap my head around this," he said. "Something from a little notebook, written on the West Side of Cincinnati, made it to a museum in New York City." Hoggard leaned forward. Quickly apologizing for interrupting - she's very impulsive - she let loose with a burst of enthusiasm as she explained her post 9/11 actions. "The messages I collected, Aaron's poem included," she said, "let kids know they made a difference. And if you do that with kids, they will keep trying to do good. They will learn that random acts of kindness don't go unnoticed." A random act helped Hoggard. She was several months into her rescue efforts. Fatigue had set in. She recalled how the whole thing began. She had just struck up a conversation with a New York firefighter at Ground Zero. He was admiring the "Dear Hero" letters she had pinned to the walls of the mess tent. She told him about the buckets of cards and letters that had found their way to the tent just by bearing the simple address: Ground Zero. He told her: You think you've got lots of mail, lady? There's so much at the firehouses some of it will have to go to a landfill. "You can't throw it away," she declared. "This means too much to too many people." The firefighter agreed. He took her to the city's firehouses. She saw towers of mail stacked in galvanized tubs next to fire trucks. She convinced the firefighters that she take it for safe-keeping. She began collecting pieces of mail by the ton. These weren't just cards and letters. They were "pieces of history. They had to be saved." And that's how an indefatigable flight attendant from Cincinnati came to amass 3½ tons of "Dear Hero" notes. She did it on her own time. And her own dime. Hoggard did not collect a penny for amassing the collection or donating it to the 9/11 museum. She did find "over $20,000 in the envelopes that the notes came in. I donated that to New York City's firefighters union." To the mourning firefighters, her mission was a blessing. She once overheard a first-responder say of her: "I don't know who she is or where she came from. All I know is she comes here and she takes the stuff and she's going to save it." But one day she needed saving. The physical and emotional enormity of her self-appointed task left her feeling overwhelmed. Help came in an e-mail from a friend. She told Hoggard she would feel better if she read the attached poem. Hoggard's friend got the poem from a pal, Sara Walsh, who was playing the part of the proud aunt. The poem was written by Walsh's nephew - none other than Aaron Walsh. Hoggard read and re-read the poem. Every time she reached the last stanza, she found more strength to carry on: "I hold in my hands.. Hope. Hope for the future. Hope for peace. Hope for my country's freedom. And hope for America to win this war on terrorism." She expressed surprise that the poem was written by a sixth-grader. "I was amazed at all of this maturity spewing from the head of a kid who was only 11," Hoggard said. Walsh smiled. She turned to the college student. "Ten years later, I still read your poem to get inspired," she told him. "A copy is in my work bag right now," she added. "I give it to passengers who need a boost. I don't tell people what I've done. I just tell them the story about how those little kids made a difference at Ground Zero. "Then I pull out the poem."