I was at Ground Zero NYC. As I toured the area around the wreckage site, a pilgrimage many of us do (and ask me why roasting cashews is a trigger), I saw a firefighter on the sidewalk. He was on the low curb, his legs in the roadway almost splayed out like a child, hands on knees, palms up meditatively, dressed in full turnout, mask hanging from his neck, big hat beside him, slumped over and breathing slowly.

He’s sleeping the sleep of the exhausted who can’t stop, can’t go home, but needs 30 min to keep going.

We quietly moved on, even though the ambient noise was insane, as we didn’t want to be the ones to wake him back into this hell. Let him be a monument for a moment longer, for years after.

25 years later and images from that time are still with me. We haven’t learned from the disaster. We haven’t fixed the broken things that led to this extremist vandalism and mass murder. The religious extremists are now bombing schools and homes in Lebanon and Iran, and continue destroying Palestine and many other sites.