It's getting to be that date again. You know, the one we now like to pretend never happened and life, hearts and landscape were changed forever - or so we thought.
No, it's been 14 years and visual scars are healed in Lower Manhattan, Arlington, Virginia, and Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The smoldering heaps have been changed to pleasant fountains or a spacious park in the countryside. The Pentagon soldiers on, with only a few blocks of singed Indiana limestone embedded to show the horror inflicted on that day.
But the date of September 11, 2001, lives constantly in the homes of over 3,000 individuals who lost their lives that day in a mind-shattering senseless attack on US soil. Hear the raspy breathing of the now-wasted man in the hospital bed? He was a first responder that day and went in to help, both before and after the World Trade Center towers collapsed. He and too many like him have developed a mysterious syndrome that is ending their lives just for doing his duty or pitching in as a bystander that could shake off the hideousness long enough to assist.
The media chatter tonight is about supposed hit lists for this anniversary - people like New York mayor Bill DeBlasio, financial genius Malcom Forbes, computer forefather Bill Gates. Yet after the normal 30 seconds of airtime, conversation moves on to the herd of presidential candidates, a city's cash award to the family of a man needlessly dead while in its custody, and reviews of the new Late Show which debuted last night on CBS.
Please, dear Lord, never let me forget how I felt on that day. I never want to lose the absolutely crippling sense of mourning I felt as I viewed the news broadcasts. May I forever keep in my heart and soul the realization that these were my brother and sister countrymen being murdered for something as mundane as showing up for work or boarding a plane.
Yes, I know this photo is hard to see. But it's of this ordinary man who went to work on a flawless Tuesday morning only to have a hijacked plane slam into the building where his office was. All avenues of reasonable escape were cut off by the flames and the structural damage. One wonders: did he seek a place where he could try and coax that mobile phone into reaching his loved ones one more time? Was he calm and collected, or was he frenzied with fear? What in his mind, heart and soul gave him the impetus to flee from that incredibly high window? Lastly, was he conscious for the freefall, or did he mercifully black out before making contact with the pavement?
September 11, 2001, must, in my strong opinion, never be relegated to petty politics or conspiracy theories or even those few unbalanced souls who presented themselves as survivors when they were not. Respect for humanity - loving thy neighbor as thyself - moves this day in history to far more than just a national day of mourning and remembrance.
These victims did not meet an act of specific genocide for their race, faith, or anything else. They were chosen for slaughter to prove a political point by an extremist group who felt their courage in precipitating these deaths would provide them the ultimate heaven.
Don't let those whose lives were crushed by such narrow thinking be lost in the dusk of fading memory. Don't just look at the pretty fountains, sweeping park land, scarred stone. There was hell in those places, but we don't have the capacity as humans to continually absorb that reality. Think of the falling man, as he has become known, and vow that horror like that will never be visited on our land or our citizens again.
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