2,996
This entry was posted on 9/10/2006 1:49 PM and is filed under Memorial.
September 11, 2006: Rosanne Lang, 1959-2001[Today’s posting is part of The 2,996 Project.]We never met Rosanne Lang. At least, not so that we remember. She would commute from Middletown, New Jersey, to her job as an equities trader at Cantor Fitzgerald. Maybe we once sat beside her on the PATH train to the World Trade Center, or she might’ve been in the car next to us outside the Holland Tunnel. A lot of female executives come into Manhattan from the New Jersey suburbs.
What we need to know about Rosanne is found on
tribute pages online. Her friends and family celebrate her as a loving single mom with a teenage son. She was proud of her home. She was a successful executive who’d still find time to go out with friends. She liked to sing. Loud.
She was living the kind of life that Islamofascists despise.
We’ve grown to joke about it, but there are people who honestly believe that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. The operative word is “man.” We know that Rosanne would never have settled for living under the freedoms dreamt of by the terrorists who murdered her.
It’s not likely that Rosanne spent much time thinking about the global impact of her everyday life. Still, she must have known that there were people she had never met who hated her—if only for working alongside men as if she were some kind of equal.
In a further tragedy for the Lang family, one of those men was
her nephew, in an office elsewhere that day at the World Trade Center.
Rosanne Lang died for all of her freedoms. She died for all of our freedoms, as well. That's why she must never be forgotten.
