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Writer Christie Blatchford had two powerful arrows in her quiver: empathy and outrage. There were good guys and bad guys, and God help you if you were picking on the good guys and Blatch knew about it.
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There was no better example of the immense firepower she wielded with these sometimes-contradictory qualities than 9/11.
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Blatch, a Governor-General’s-Literary-Award-winning author who worked for every major Toronto daily during her 45-year career, died in February 2020 after falling ill while covering the 2019 election.
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On Sept. 11, 2001, she was a Toronto-based columnist for the National Post, and she raced to Manhattan when the twin towers fell. You couldn’t have stopped her. She was inside Ground Zero not long after midnight.
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In the days that followed, she fused a good-and-evil worldview with an open heart for the victims of 9/11 and their bereft families, and for the heroes who confronted the aftermath of Islamist terror.
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Today, the day after the 25th anniversary of the tragedy, we reprint the column she wrote the day after 9/11 itself. They remind us of what was lost on 9/11, and what we lost when Blatch passed.
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“There is no there here,” she wrote a day or two after she got to Manhattan. “The greatest rescue effort in American history is for naught. There was almost no one left to save, few whole bodies to take to the empty waiting morgues, only bone and tissue embedded in the thousands upon thousands of documents that even in an internet age were produced in the economic heart of this country and that flew out of the skyscraper when they exploded and collapsed and literally buried their thousands in paperwork.”
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Twenty-five years later, her writing reminds us how we felt in those first few days. Empathy. Outrage. And a confidence that the good guys were up to the challenge.
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- Christie Blatchford at Ground Zero on Sept. 12, 2001
- Christie Blatchford at the Bush speech from the rubble on Sept. 15, 2001
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— Rob Roberts, editor-in-chief
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NEW YORK – Here lies the new Book of the Dead.
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As thousands of years before Christ the ancient Egyptians prepared the earliest of their mortuary texts, so are Americans now writing theirs.
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The first entries made in this colossal tomb were scrawled by fingers in the filth of the windows of the Brooks Brothers skyscraper, directly across the plaza from the soaring Twin Towers that once defined the New York City skyline and which, like the people in them, simply are no more.
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In sooty grime on the plaza-fronting windows it is written “God Bless the Dead” and “God Speed” and, on the Liberty Street side, the line borrowed from the stirring unofficial anthem that Irving Berlin created and Kate Smith rendered a battle cry, “The Land That We Loved.”
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There is no there here. The greatest rescue effort in American history is for naught. There was almost no one left to save, few whole bodies to take to the empty waiting morgues, only bone and tissue imbedded in the thousands upon thousands of documents that even in an internet age were produced in the economic heart of this country and that flew out of the skyscrapers when they exploded and collapsed and literally buried their thousands in paperwork.