Guest Editorial from the New York Times: New Yorkers muster necessary courage

Saturday, Sept. 15, 2001 | 8:07 a.m.

Sooner or later, we all wonder if we have it in us to be brave when bravery is needed. Ever since New York City was struck by a terrorist attack, the answer has been coming in, and it is just what we hoped for and expected.

We have heard episode after episode in which someone, coming down or going up the stairwell of the World Trade Center, perhaps, or trapped outside in the coils of a dark burning cloud with strangers, has done just what needed to be done, and it was more than enough. In Lower Manhattan, exhausted emergency workers of every kind have acted as though there were nothing special to think about what they were doing.

There is another kind of courage besides the kind that has been tested in fire and smoke downtown. It is the kind the whole city will be needing in the weeks ahead. It may simply be the strength to damp down the anxiety people naturally feel in the aftermath of this attack. It may be the ability to look neighbors who have lost someone directly in the eye and to accept the pain that comes with making connection.

A few blocks from the buried World Trade Center plaza, the chaos of Tuesday had given way to remarkable order and precision. Enormous trucks loaded with wreckage -- a twist of steel skin from the facade of one of the fallen buildings, a crushed coffee and bagel cart, a flattened auto -- stopped briefly to be hosed down before heading out. Uniformed men and women flowed past the National Guard barricade purposefully, wearing hospital scrubs, police blues, a firefighter's rigging, or sometimes just a face mask and a carton of bottled water. No one seemed to be directing the flow at that checkpoint, but no direction was needed. People walked forward until they found something that needed doing, and then they did it.