25 years after 9/11, honoring ‘beautiful examples of selfless courage’
This is our good-news Friday, so here, as always, is Fix the News.
But let’s make this a goodness Friday, focusing on the selflessness of so many of our fellow humans during and after the terrorist attacks on New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.
At an event with former President George W. Bush at the Bush Presidential Center in Dallas on Sept. 9, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Gen. Dan Caine talked about his experience as an F-16 fighter pilot on 9/11. Caine noted the “beautiful examples of selfless courage” that day and afterward.
Among those many examples:
— Fighter pilot Heather Penney was prepared to sacrifice herself to stop Flight 93, a hijacked plane flying toward Washington, D.C.
— Firefighters ran into the burning World Trade Center towers, and 343 died when the towers collapsed.
— Rick Rescorla, a British-American soldier turned head of security at Morgan Stanley at the World Trade Center, evacuated more than 2,500 of the company’s employees before returning inside. His body never was found. A ceremony to honor him is being held today in his home town in England.
— All over the United States, young people felt called to join the military in the days after 9/11. Here, three veterans discuss their mix of pride, regret, frustration and gratitude.
Also notably, some Morgan Stanley survivors changed their lives after the attacks, something psychologists call post-traumatic growth, The Washington Post reports.
CNN’s Brian Stelter says in his Reliable Sources column that he recommends the documentary “9/11” (streaming here) for Americans who aren’t old enough to remember 9/11. He says he’s shown parts of it to his children “to help them recognize the heroism on display that day.”
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