@TheSwiftSociety Who is the man in the glasses looking pissed off. He must live a miserable life to not enjoy these two little girls meeting their hero!
My fellow Americans: Please direct your attention to this matter for just a moment. Allow this to sink in. The President of the United States of America just said he wants to ban the free press. He said he doesn’t want them in his office, which by the way is the Oval Office in the People’s House. This is unheard of, and we the people cannot let this be!
For the record, we have a free press in this country. For the record we should all be worried not just about this latest outburst, but by all of it going forward without permission — putting our service members in harms way, raising tariffs willy nilly, threatening buildings and institutions unless his name gets put on them. This is not the behavior of a centered leader who is focused on the good of the people. This is not the behavior of a compassionate leader focused on the millions of Americans who cannot afford healthcare, childcare, gas, or food. This is not the behavior of a man who can emotionally regulate himself.
We should all be concerned — those who voted for him and those who didn’t. The midterms are around the corner. Vote like your life and the lives of others are at stake, because they are. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
OH. MY. GOD.
If you have EVER fantasized about what you'd tell trump to his face if you had the chance, Rep. Joyce Beatty just DID that.
He thought he was going to call her names. And he found out.
So good. 🔥 🔥 🔥
@BubblesCow@japan_nobunaga We visited the Memorial Pools on Thursday, Sept. 10 for the third time. It just gets more emotional as the years go on. We didn't really know anyone, but watched in horror that day. I had been in the building in 1991 and 1995 which I think makes it hit hard even more.
One month after September 11, workers clearing the rubble at Ground Zero found something alive.
A tree.
Eight feet of blackened stump. Roots snapped. Every branch broken but one.
They could have thrown it away with the rest. Nobody would have noticed.
They did not.
It was a Callery pear. Nobody had ever paid attention to it. It had been planted in the 1970s in the plaza between Buildings 4 and 5 of the World Trade Center, one of dozens of ornamental trees the Port Authority put in to make the concrete feel less like concrete. Office workers ate lunch under it. Tourists walked past it on their way to the observation deck.
On the morning of September 11, a hundred and ten stories fell on it. Twice.
In October, on the pile, someone saw a single living branch sticking out of the wreckage. Green. Still trying.
A decision was made on the spot. They dug it out.
The city's Parks Department took the stump to a nursery in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. The horticulturists there looked at it and were not optimistic. The trunk was charred. The root system was mostly gone. Trees in that condition do not usually come back.
They went to work anyway. They cleaned the burns. They trimmed the dead wood. They set it in good soil. They watered it. And they waited.
That first spring, in 2002, against everything the experts expected, the stump put out blossoms.
Small white flowers, on a tree that had been under the World Trade Center six months earlier.
It stayed in the Bronx for nine years. Relearning how to be a tree. Growing new branches out of the old scarred wood. Getting taller. Filling out.
In 2010, weeks before it was finally scheduled to go home, a storm tore through the nursery and ripped it out of the ground.
The people who had been nursing it for nine years came out the next morning and found it on its side, roots exposed again.
They stood it back up. They repacked the soil. It survived that too.
On December 22, 2010, it was replanted at the 9/11 Memorial in lower Manhattan, a few steps from where the South Tower had stood. Where it had been found.
The eight-foot stump is now more than thirty feet tall.
Walk up to it and look at the trunk. There is a line on it. Below the line, the bark is dark and gnarled and twisted. That is the wood from 2001. Above the line, the bark is smooth and pale and new. That is everything that grew after.
The tree does not hide the line. It does not cover it over. The scar is right there, and the whole rest of the tree grows up and out of it.
People tie tags to the railing around it. Prayers. Names. Messages to the dead.
Every spring it is the first thing on the entire plaza to bloom. It goes white before the other trees have even leafed.
In 2013, the Memorial started a program. They gathered seedlings from the Survivor Tree, and every year they sent them to a community that had just had its own worst day.
Newtown, Connecticut, after Sandy Hook. Orlando, after Pulse. Puerto Rico, after Maria. Paris. Manchester. London.
A small tree from the rubble of the World Trade Center, planted in the ground of the next place that thought it would never grow anything again.
Twenty-five years ago this month, a hundred and ten stories of steel came down on a pear tree and someone on the pile saw one green branch and said, not that one.
Not that one.
The last living thing pulled out of Ground Zero has children now, growing all over the world.
It did not survive by being untouched.
It survived by growing out of the wound. 🌸
Luke Perry, such a beloved classmate and friend, in 2019, due to a stroke. Gone too soon. Three years ago, like we lost another dearly loved classmate from a stroke. They happened to be roommates, every band camp!
@jstdonut I know exactly where I was. I also know exactly what I said to my mother when she called and told me to get the t v on. We kept in the phone and watched in horror for hours as the events unfolded.
I think it’s perfectly fine to realize that 9/11 WAS a tragedy but so was the aftermath, the war and the islamophobia and just general shift in the country as a whole. like many things can be true at once