MOLI VIEW™

Looking at the newspapers today, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, appear to be receding into history. The New York Times marked the sixth anniversary with an unobtrusively placed front-page story about how Mayor Michael Bloomberg is ready for the city to move on. (Perhaps feeling that was not quite enough, after all, the NYT website posted a short Reuters piece this morning suggesting that maybe New Yorkers are not so eager to move on after all.) New York magazine took a breather from Fashion Week to run a feature called "The Girl in the 9/11 Bubble," which basically asks the question of why a young woman whose father died in the World Trade Center has not moved on. The Washington Post has a lovely little story on the building of the Pentagon Memorial tucked in alongside the more extensive coverage of General Petraeus's testimony on progress in the Iraq war (ironically, an Iraqi-American owns the company making the memorial's steel benches). The message seems to be: We haven't forgotten, but we have other pressing matters to attend to.
Vast sums of money were raised immediately after the attacks to support the survivors and memorialize the victims. An American Red Cross report released last year shows that that organization alone took in nearly $1.1 billion and spent $1 billion on relief efforts through what it called the Liberty Fund. The remaining funds have been dedicated to longer-term mental-health and health-care needs through the September 11 Recovery Program, and through grants to community service groups providing health screening and services. The report predicts the Liberty Fund will be tapped out by December 31, 2008. Most other funds opened in response to the attacks have already dried up.

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