9/11: It’s today — the 17th anniversary of the tragic terrorist attacks on American soil.
We would be remiss if we didn’t pause to reflect on the incredible bravery and heroism shown by so many that fateful day.
The attacks caused a total of 2,296 deaths, and more than 6,000 injuries.
And consider this — most high school students today were born after 9/11, having never known a world without the Department of Homeland Security and the TSA. Taking off shoes at the airport and not being able to carry liquids were safety measures implemented after 9/11, too.
Before 9/11, likely few people in Pennsylvania, let alone the rest of the nation, knew of Shanksville. Now, of course, there is a memorial to Flight 93, on which passengers and crew fought the terrorists who had hijacked the plane, and crashed it into a field instead of its intended destination of Washington, D.C.
“A common field one day. A field of honor forever,” reads the National Park Service page on the Flight 93 National Memorial.
The 17th anniversary observance will be held at 9:45 a.m. today on the Memorial Plaza there.
The Tower of Voices, dedicated on Sunday, will serve as a visual and audible reminder of the heroism of the 40 passengers and crew of United Flight 93.
The tower is a 93-foot-tall musical instrument holding 40 windchimes, representing those 40 people who thwarted an attack on the nation’s capital.
“There are no other chime structures like this in the world. The shape and orientation of the tower are designed to optimize air flow through the tower walls to reach the interior chime chamber,” the park service’s website reads. “The chime system is designed using music theory to identify a mathematically developed range of frequencies needed to produce a distinct musical note associated with each chime. The applied music theory allows the sound produced by individual chimes to be musically compatible with the sound produced by the other chimes in the tower. The intent is to create a set of forty tones (voices) that can connote through consonance the serenity and nobility of the site while also through dissonance recalling the event that consecrated the site.”
