`Ground Zero': looking west from Church Street. (Of Several Minds).

I did not pay close attention to the media coverage of the September 11 commemorative events. So much of it seemed overdone, politically dubious, and incapable of coming to terms with the horror or the consequences of that day. Nor, although Commonweal's offices are in Manhattan, had I been down to "Ground Zero" in the year since the attack. I finally went last week.

Until five years ago, Commonweal was located on Dutch Street, just off Fulton Street, only three blocks from the World Trade Center. (We are now adjacent to Columbia University at the other end of the island.) The conference room in our old offices had a small skylight through which you could glimpse the towers, which sometimes literally disappeared into the clouds on foggy days. If we had remained on Dutch Street, the publication of the magazine would certainly have been interrupted in the aftermath of the catastrophe. Although I would occasionally walk over to the World Trade Center (WTC) or the Winter Garden at the World Financial Center, I never visited the south tower's observation deck. I'm not sure why. Perhaps it seemed like something a tourist, not a commuter, would do. I thought I would get to it eventually. I do remember my son coming to the city with his high school class and watching as he and his classmates went up the escalator to the elevators that would rocket them to the 110th floor. I thought of my son's time in the tower as I watched the building collapse on TV last September.

It was a Friday afternoon, around lunchtime, when I made my pilgrimage, and the streets to the east of the WTC site were thronged with people. Part of Fulton Street was blocked off to cars, and a crowd had gathered around a pair of acrobats who commandeered the street and were flinging themselves through the air like cartoon characters. As I walked west toward where the towers had stood, the sidewalks were lined with vendors of every conceivable sort of memorabilia, from FDNY and NYPD T-shirts and caps to glossy picture books about the WTC's history. New York is first and foremost a center of commerce, and there was something reassuring about the presence of so many people, many of them immigrants, trying to wring a living out of the wounded, but ever-resilient city.

Coming upon the WTC site, I was of course disoriented. The last time I had been there, Church Street, which runs north and south, had been a broad and busy avenue. Crossing it, you ascended a series of stairs to gain access to the WTC plaza. Now the street is half as wide and crossing it you come to a kind of promenade from which you survey the ruins from behind a high metal fence. Affixed to the fence are large black-and-white photographs documenting the site's history, from 1915 to September 22, 2002. Just on the other side of the fence stood the much-photographed cross fashioned out of rusted steel girders by the excavation workers. I had seen many pictures of the cross in newspapers and magazines, and thought it too crude to make much of an impression. Seeing it now against the enormous backdrop of the excavation site, it possessed a stark, evocative power.

Everything was remarkably tidy, and the series of photographs along the fence gave an almost museum-like air to the place. Predictably, a street musician was playing the "Battle Hymn of The Republic" on his flute, giving the whole experience the feel of a Ken Burns documentary. Standing back from the fence to get my bearings, I found myself next to a young man in a baseball cap who was scribbling in a notebook. His cap was worn slightly askew, and his hair was cut extremely short in an unusual geometric pattern around his ears. After a minute, he approached me and mumbled something. He spoke in a heavy Hispanic accent. All I could understand was the word "citizens," and I asked him to repeat his question. "How many citizens passed away here?" he asked.

I was momentarily taken aback, even made suspicious, by the question. Could there be a person alive who did not know how many people had been killed on September 11, 2001? Where had this young man been hiding? Was it possible to escape such information? "Almost three thousand," I told him. He thanked me, stepped away, and continued writing in his notebook.

"Citizen" is not a word often used in the context of mourning. I suspect it was not exactly the word my young interlocutor was groping for. Yet I found the associations it conjured up helpful. Frankly, my reaction to the carnage of that day has often been a kind of numbness. I've had a hard time making emotional sense of it. Although I was in Manhattan that day and vividly remember finding my way home across an eerily quit and orderly city, it was still an event I largely experienced through television. I knew no one who died.

We have endlessly been reminded that the victims were innocent mothers and fathers, self-sacrificing firemen and police officers, hardworking providers, striving immigrants, and young men and women with all of life ahead of them. So they were. But it is equally important to remember the twenty-eight hundred victims as fellow citizens (or aspiring citizens), people with whom we shared a democratic faith and culture. It was precisely because they were citizens of the United States that the terrorists targeted those in the towers. When we remember them, we could do worse than to remind ourselves of what it means to be citizens and not merely individuals pursuing private ends.