A 9/11 has never passed without my attempt to learn from it with another year of wisdom and distance to assist me in processing and analyzing it. 9/11 is the day I wish we could all press the pause button and call a temporary truce on all the ways in which we divide ourselves. So as Ghandi says, I will be the change I wish to see in the world, and press that pause button today.
8 years have gone by since we stood helpless, shocked, and heartbroken..frozen in time in front our televisions watching the towers crash down, and the heroes rise up; 8 years since we collectively mourned the loss yet unknown numbers of our brethren.
On that day, like no other, we saw the world for what really is: a place of great evil, and a place of great compassion; a place of unforgiving hate, but also of unyielding love; a place where small men cling to grudges that divide us, while great men cling to hope and unify us. The mask slipped and for a moment, we all saw that there ARE absolutes, and there are two opposite forces at work; and we all understood that good men must stand against evil, or else relinquish himself to it.
On that day we also saw who we are. We became the national equivalent of the family who bickers constantly, but pulls together like no other when tragedy strikes. We let go of the divisions between us, and cried for people we had never met. We gave blood for people who voted different than us. We prayed for people who live lifestyles we don't understand. We held hands with people who didn't worship the same way we did. We stood behind a President we may not have voted for. We hung flags out for weeks on our cars, at our homes, in our cubicles... we watched the firefighters raise a dusty tattered flag to a rod from the collapsed Tower, and our hearts filled with pride that flowed out of our eyes and rolled down our cheeks. We stood all together as one people, one nation, one heartbroken family.
This is who we are, though it doesn't seem like it as we stand here today, in 2009, more bitterly divided than seemingly ever before. But I know that the true character of a family is not defined by the times where luxury allows for petty divisions, but rather when the storms roll in, and the waters rise, and the family pulls together without question, without asking, and without hesitation. This is who we have always been, and it is who we still are underneath the layers of sibling rivalry, false paradigms, and turf wars.
It doesn't take another attack to bring us back to that truth. We have this day every year, September 11th, to refresh our minds, to retrace those steps, to replace ourselves in the shoes we wore that day. We should never allow anyone to diminish the true meaning of this dark day in our history, even though its painful to relive. Rather we should embrace the feelings and the memories of that day, not to play on our fears, but to remind us of what this world is, and who we are in it.
I never want to be callused to emotions of 9/11, and I hope the tears still fall at the 50 anniversary as they do on this 8th anniversary. And above all, I hope we still remember who we were that day is who we always will be, a family whose unity is its greatest strength.
9.11.01 Nunquam Alieno
"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that." ~Martin Luther King
"There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America."
~Bill Clinton
"Let us be sure that those who come after will say of us in our time, that in our time we did everything that could be done. We finished the race; we kept the free; we kept the faith" ~Ronald Reagan.
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