CHEVONNE FARLER

[Mr PitBull Stories @MrPitbull07]

Gen X is currently stuck in the brutal vice grip of the "Sandwich Generation," and it’s completely reshaping their priorities.

You’re 49. Your kids are 17 and about to leave the nest forever. At the exact same time, your parents are 79 and rapidly losing their memory, mobility, and independence.

You sit in a sterile conference room on a Thursday listening to a 32-year-old consultant talk about "cross-functional synergy," and you realize you have maybe five good summers left with your parents and six months before your teenager moves out.

The idea of trading another 50 hours a week to chase a "Senior Vice President" title stops sounding prestigious and starts sounding like an absolute tragedy.

Gen X isn't burning out because they're tired of working. They’re opting out because they finally calculated the real cost of being absent.

[Hope Adams @Hopeful_inIdaho]

@empiremagazine @netflix Aslan is a male.

[Brandon Lansdown @BrandonLansdown]

My dear Wormwood,

You still think in terms of churches and arguments. That is why you fail. The churches can be left standing. What must be spoiled is the literature that taught the young to love the Enemy before they could define Him.

Narnia is one of the more irritating of those books. Children meet Aslan first as adventure and only later discover they have been handling Christ. That is dangerous. Direct attack only makes the stories more precious. So we do not ban them. We adapt them.

Give the Voice to a so-called celebrated actress. Leave the mane. Leave the pronouns. Then the thing that was a male Christ-supposition becomes a prestige performance. The story remains famous; the meaning becomes negotiable. In a generation the story will still be beloved, but the beloved thing will no longer be Lewis’s Lion. It will be the version that flatters the age.

That is how the Enemies literature is destroyed without the vulgarity of a bonfire. Keep the title. Change the sound. When the children hear Aslan, let them hear the present century speaking through Him. Once that habit is formed, the Enemies stories survive as brands. Their doctrine does not.

Do not call it persecution. Call it interpretation. The patients prefer that word, and it does our work admirably.

Your affectionate uncle,
SCREWTAPE

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

On September 11, both towers of the World Trade Center came down less than one hundred yards from a 235-year-old church.

Not one of its windows broke.

For the next eight months, it did not close. Not once. Not for a single hour.

St. Paul's Chapel opened in 1766. It is the oldest church building in Manhattan. On April 30, 1789, George Washington walked out of his inauguration as the first President of the United States and came straight here to pray. His pew is still inside.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, a hundred and ten stories of steel fell in the churchyard's direction.

A sycamore tree on the corner of the property, about a hundred years old, took the hit. A steel beam that should have gone through the chapel wall went into the tree instead. The sycamore was torn out by its roots.

The chapel behind it stood. Every pane of glass intact. Only the organ was damaged by dust.

Within days, the church made a decision.

Across the street, thousands of firefighters, police, ironworkers, and volunteers were digging through sixteen acres of rubble for the dead. They were working twelve and sixteen hour shifts. They had nowhere to sit. Nowhere to eat. Nowhere to sleep. Nowhere to be a human being for ten minutes.

So St. Paul's opened its doors. And it left them open, twenty-four hours a day, until May 30, 2002.

Here is what the inside of a church looked like for those eight months.

The choir loft became a dormitory. Cots in rows. Firefighters too exhausted to make it home to Queens or Brooklyn slept there in their turnout gear.

The pews became beds. Men in steel-toed boots lay down on 235-year-old wood and slept for an hour, and got up, and went back to the pile.

Three thousand meals a day. Breakfast, sandwiches, bagels, coffee, and, because New York restaurants were sending whatever they had, Thai food, Italian, Mexican. One volunteer put it simply. If it was Monday, it was meatloaf.

George Washington's pew, the one he knelt in as the first President of this country, became the podiatry station.

Volunteer foot doctors sat there and treated blisters and torn-open feet. The workers were spending sixteen hours a day on twisted steel and broken glass. Their feet were destroyed. A podiatrist would sit them down in Washington's pew, take off their boots, and go to work.

The volunteers said the podiatrists were the most popular people in the building.

Chiropractors worked the aisles. Massage therapists set up tables. Musicians came and played, quietly, so that men who had been pulling bodies out of the ground for twelve hours could sit with their eyes closed and hear something that was not a diesel engine.

More than five thousand volunteers passed through, in twelve-hour shifts, around the clock, for eight months. They came from every state. Most of them had never been to New York. They made beds. They served meals. They washed dishes. They sat with firefighters who did not want to talk and did not want to be alone.

The clergy wore a vestment during services, and workers started pinning their patches to it. FDNY. NYPD. Port Authority. Ironworkers Local 40. Search and rescue teams from Texas and California. By the end it was covered.

Outside, the wrought-iron fence around the churchyard filled up. Flags. Photographs of the missing. Children's drawings. Rosaries. Letters. It stretched the full length of the block. A wall of grief in front of a building that had somehow come through untouched.

A poet who volunteered there said it this way. What happened at Ground Zero was hate. What happened at St. Paul's was the reverse of it.

On May 30, 2002, the recovery operation officially ended. That same day, St. Paul's held a closing service for the workers, and the eight-month ministry ended.

The church cleaned up. They repaired the organ. They refinished the floors.

But there was one thing they decided not to fix.

The pews.

Two hundred and thirty-five years old, and now covered in scratches and gouges. From steel-toed boots. From tool belts. From men who lay down in them, for an hour, in the middle of the worst days of their lives.

The church left every mark.

They are still there.

You can walk in today, sit down where a firefighter slept in October 2001, and run your hand along the wood, and feel where his belt buckle caught.

The roots of the sycamore are cast in bronze in the churchyard now.

The tree died. The church lived. And then it spent eight months keeping other people alive.

Not one window broke.

Not one door closed. 🇺🇸

[2001 Live @25YearsAgoLive]

Astounding footage from 9:59 AM yesterday as the South Tower collapses almost on top of ABC7 reporter N.J. Burkett - and the crowd running in terror from the cloud following them.

[Fotos de Fatos @FotosDeFatos]

Você já tinha visto essas imagens do WTC?

O #11deSetembro de 2001.

[Rich Walsh KDKA @RichieWalsh]

If you watch one thing today... I highly encourage spending 13 minutes watching this... captivating.

Hard to hold back the tears

[SergioLR🪖 @CasetaBosque]

Uno de los vídeos más impactantes de los atentados del 11 de septiembre.

Un superviviente del piso 72 de la torre norte estaba dando una entrevista a las noticias locales de abc7, con una multitud de personas escuchando su increíble historia de escape.

En mitad de la entrevista, esa misma torre de la que logró salir, colapsó por completo.

[PsyopAnime @PsyopAnime]

Never forget.

This one was very personal to me.
Warning: Sensitive imagery.

[Matthew Keys @MatthewKeysLive]

.@MajorCBS was traveling with President George W. Bush during his education and literacy tour when the 9/11 attacks began.

Rare video of his live shot for CNN.

[Rikki Ratliff @rikkiratliff]

This package produced by Glenn’s team left me heaving with sobs in the studio today. I was suddenly 22 again on a college gap year. A little aimless, a little late to work, and wondering if it was worth finishing my journalism degree.

That is until I heard the broadcasters on radio and TV rise to the meet the moment. I shed my apathy like a too-tight sweater that was beginning to suffocate.

By August 2002 I enrolled back in school, determined to become one of the best damn truth-tellers in broadcasting.

It’s 25 years later. It still hurts like hell. But that just means I’m still very much awake, and I’m grateful for it.

[RevaliTheBerner @RussianBerner]

Sharing a post 🙏🥹🐾🐕‍🦺

On September 11, 2001, dogs served in different ways across the World Trade Center disaster — searching rubble, detecting danger, and guiding people through smoke-filled stairwells to safety.
Apollo, an NYPD German Shepherd, searched the ruins of Ground Zero alongside rescue crews.
Bretagne, a young Golden Retriever with Texas Task Force 1, worked through dust, twisted steel, and devastation. Years later, she became widely remembered as the last known surviving 9/11 search-and-rescue dog.
Jake, a black Labrador who had once been abandoned and badly injured, grew up to become a certified search-and-rescue dog. After 9/11, he spent days working through the wreckage at Ground Zero.
Sirius, a Port Authority Police yellow Labrador trained to detect explosives, was inside the World Trade Center that morning. His handler, Officer David Lim, secured him before rushing to help others evacuate.
Lim survived.
Sirius did not.
He became known as the only police dog killed in the 9/11 attacks.
And then there were Roselle and Salty.
They weren’t searching the rubble.
They were guide dogs.
Roselle helped her blind handler, Michael Hingson, escape from the 78th floor of the North Tower.
Salty helped his blind handler, Omar Rivera, descend from the 71st floor.
Through darkness, noise, fear, crowded stairwells, and chaos, they kept moving.
Six dogs.
Six very different stories.
Search dogs. Police dogs. Guide dogs.
None of them knew the meaning of terrorism.
None understood why that morning had changed America forever.
They simply did what they had been trained to do — and stayed beside the people who depended on them.
More than two decades later, their names still deserve to be remembered.
Apollo. Bretagne. Jake. Sirius. Roselle. Salty.
They searched.
They guided.
They served.
Never forget September 11, 2001. 🇺🇸🐾
#September11 #911 #NeverForget #GroundZero #SearchAndRescue #K9 #GuideDogs #HeroDogs #Apollo #Bretagne #Jake #Sirius #Roselle #Salty

[Soulwood_B @Soy_tuMamita]

La mejor explicación que he visto de lo que sucedió el 9/11.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

At Ground Zero, after the last living person was pulled out, the search dogs stopped eating.

So the police did something nobody had written down in any manual.

They climbed into the rubble, lay down, and pretended to be alive.

More than 300 dogs worked the World Trade Center site. They came from every corner of the country, on trucks and in cargo holds, with handlers who had been trained to do one thing. Find people who are still breathing under the ground.

That is what a search and rescue dog is built for. Not bodies. Life. They are trained on live human scent. When they find it, they bark, they dig, they light up, and the handler rewards them, and the whole thing means something.

The last living person recovered from Ground Zero was a woman named Genelle Guzman-McMillan. She had been buried for 27 hours. A dog found her.

She was the last.

After that, the dogs kept going out on twelve-hour shifts, across sixteen acres of smoldering steel, at temperatures that burned their paws, and they found nobody.

Nobody.

Day after day.

The handlers noticed it first. The dogs were changing. Their tails were down. They were not eating. They would come off the pile and lie flat and not look at anyone.

A veterinarian named Cindy Otto, who spent ten days there working night shifts to care for the animals, put it plainly. The dogs had been sent to find life, and every day they were finding the opposite.

It was breaking them.

An NYPD officer named Famiglietti described what happened next.

They pulled everybody off the rubble. Then they asked for volunteers.

The volunteers, police officers, went out into the debris and hid themselves. Under beams. In voids. Curled up in pockets of concrete. They were told to lie down like they were hurt. Then the handlers sent the dogs in.

Picture that.

A grown man with a badge, a man who had spent the last week pulling friends out of that same pile, lying down in it on purpose. Face down. Holding still. Waiting for a dog.

And the dog comes over the top of the wreckage, and catches the scent, and barks, and digs, and finds a person who is warm and moving and alive.

And the handler says good girl, good boy, and the whole team celebrates.

They called them mock finds.

They did it for the dogs.

They did it so the dogs would remember what they were for.

One of those dogs was a two-year-old golden retriever named Bretagne. She came from Texas with her handler, Denise Corliss. It was her first deployment. They worked ten days at Ground Zero. They found no survivors.

But firefighters would come off the pile, stone-faced, not speaking, and see the dog, and something would break open in them. They would kneel down. They would put their face in her fur.

One day a man walked up to Bretagne and started petting her. He told Corliss his best friend loved golden retrievers.

Corliss asked where his friend was.

The man pointed at the pile.

"He's in there somewhere."

He kept petting the dog.

Bretagne went on to work Hurricane Katrina and Rita. She retired at 10. She was the last known surviving search dog of 9/11.

On June 6, 2016, at age 16, she was carried into a veterinary office in Texas to be put to sleep.

Outside, a dozen firefighters from her fire department stood in a line in their dress uniforms, in the heat, and saluted as she went past.

They draped her in an American flag on the way out.

Three hundred dogs went into that pile looking for the living.

They found one.

And when they could not find any more, the men they worked beside laid down in the rubble and let themselves be found, so the dogs would not lose heart.

That is the whole story of Ground Zero, really.

Nobody could save the dead.

So they saved each other. 🇺🇸

[Colin Dunlap @colin_dunlap]

In the aftermath of 9/11, this is one of the moments I remember the most. Many on the bill sang sad or slow songs. Understandable.

Petty stood — defiant and firm — and made a proclamation for America. And stared into each of us as he did it.

[Saturday Night Live @nbcsnl]

Never Forget
September 29, 2001 (Cold Open)

[estella @sabs22wrnings]

THIS COLD OPEN HAS BEEN SO HARD TO FIND SINCE IT PREMIERED ALMOST 25 YEARS AGO. I’VE ONLY SEEN IT ONCE ON FACEBOOK (?) BECAUSE I HAD TO SEARCH FOR IT. IT’S NOT EVEN ON PEACOCK. HOLY SHIT

[The Redheaded libertarian @TRHLofficial]

The rescue dogs of 9/11

[The Redheaded libertarian @TRHLofficial]

On a day so sad for so many, I try every year to look for the helpers— and devote a thread to the Rescue dogs of 9/11-

❤️

Walk with me and get to know the goodest pups of all.

[Cat 🇺🇸🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇺🇸 @AllAmericanGrl1]

This commercial by Budweiser aired only 1 time in honor of those lost on 9/11/2001 ❤️🤍💙 #Neverforget