Children of 9/11

Five years on and there is little, if anything, new to say about the events of 9/11. The 9/11 Commission has reported and millions of other words have been expended by various analyses, all of which can be reduced to the same basic fact: on 11 September, 2001, Islamic terrorists struck at the USA homeland in a series of co-ordinated attacks, killing and maiming thousands of innocents.

Today should be for remembering those innocent victims who lost their lives and the untold numbers of survivors, families and friends who will be affected for the remainder of their lives by the events of that day, in particular the thousands of children.

Some of those affected had not even been born on 9/11.

There are dozens of children like Gabi Jacobs, born to Sept. 11 widows in the months after the attacks. Five years later, as they approach kindergarten, they are just starting to grasp the stories of their fathers and of the day that changed their lives forever.

The first baby arrived just hours after the disaster and the last nine months later. Some mothers only discovered they were pregnant after the dads were gone -- including Rudolph Giuliani's longtime aide, who was married to fire Capt. Terence Hatton. The firefighter's daughter was born the next spring, and her mother named her Terri.

Their fathers were rescue workers, cops, restaurant waiters and stockbrokers. Their mothers, pregnant and alone when the dust of the towers settled, worried about the stress on their unborn children from the agony and shock. Some miscarried. One went into labor during her husband's memorial service.

Instead of normal happy childhoods, many children's experiences have been dominated by psychological trauma, an issue examined in detail by the New York Times.

Some of the most moving post-9/11 images are children's drawings. The full version of the picture of an aeroplane crashing into the Twin Towers, at the top of this post, appeared in a Chicago Sun Times special on the 1st anniversary of 9/11. It was drawn by a 6 year old whose father had just moved away from New York prior to the atrocity. Is it not sad that a child's imagination should encompass such images.