Amidst Remembrance Resolve to Move Forward

I knew every one of those people. I didn’t know their faces or their names but I knew them all. They were husbands and wives working to make their families comfortable. They were children whose hard work and perseverance gave them the opportunities they once had. They were grandparents who were just about ready to enter a new stage of their lives doing something they had worked to be able to do. I still know them.

I am sitting at the same desk I sat at on that horrific day ten years ago. The young men and women of my classroom are different now but they are also the same in that they are striving to become as prepared as possible for their futures; futures that are not as clear as they were a short decade ago.

Looking up at the same television set I remember watching images of brave men and women with unfamiliar faces running toward those giant towers to help; to do what they must have known was impossible.

I remember my students asking me if we were at War. I didn’t know how to answer because, yes, we were at war now…but not a war we had ever seen before. A war with an enemy we are still struggling to define and understand. A war with an enemy that won’t fight by any rules we understand. A war we have to win just to go back to a simpler time that probably can’t exist.

I remember one of my students muttering the words ‘Independence Day,’ a movie about aliens invading earth and destroying our national landmarks, because that’s how unreal it seemed.

I smile as I remember back to before that day when my biggest problem was if my students were getting what I was trying to teach them. A time when words like Taliban or Bin Laden sounded like something I would use to clean my toilet.

I realize those times are gone. They have been replaced by a constant fear that what happened on September 11 could happen again. They are replaced by a knowledge that the most powerful nation on earth is susceptible to people who live in caves and sincerely believe that to die by killing innocent people would give them an eternity in heaven.

In the decade since September 11 many things have changed. The Constitution of my nation has been put in jeopardy because of a need for national security. Economically we, as a nation, are much weaker. The corporate titans of the booming times turned out to have feet of clay. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people have lost their life savings to crooks in thousand dollar suits and multi-million dollar mansions.

Some people want to make September 11 a national holiday, which would be a terrible mistake. We don’t need a holiday to remember what happened, just like my parents don’t need a holiday to remember what happened at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. For the rest of our lives we will never be able to forget.

I can’t enjoy the media blitz that is currently underway, forcing us to re-live the shock of what happened only a decade ago. I would much rather see images of our nation rebuilding itself, picking itself up from this catastrophe and moving forward.