we RISE or FALL together

Twenty years after the Twin Towers came down, the nation grapples with a new collective grief. Esquire’s SCOTT RAAB, who covered the decade effort to raise One World Trade, argues the American spirit is stronger than the forces that try to tear us apart.

- SCOTT RAAB

JANUARY 2021:

THROUGH MY ATTIC WINDOW HERE IN GLEN RIDGE, New Jersey, the World Trade Center’s glow spreads the night clouds and, through winter trees, I see the tower’s spire.

Darkness falls early these days. A literal plague ravages the land; its death toll has risen again, thousands of victims—an epic slaughter, a 9/11—every day. The American body politic roils in bloody disunion unseen since the Civil War, and though I am the grandson of four immigrants, truly grateful for all my country has given me and mine, I am no optimist. These days, I take comfort near—in my wife’s laugh, and in her arms, in imagining the next time we’ll be able to see our son, in each meal, movie, and book.

Faith and hope rise twenty miles away, where the Freedom Tower soars. It is not a symbol. It is not a metaphor. It is a spire atop an office tower surrounded by other office towers. The faith and hope I feel seeing it isn’t abstracted patriotism or spiritual pap; it’s a practical belief and an existential proof: If we got that bastard done, we can do anything.