Tomorrow is the 10th anniversary of the event that took away innocence in America: the terrorist attacks on the US, using passenger jets as bombs to hit the World Trade Center in NYC, the Pentagon in Washington, DC, and the ill-fated attempt to destroy the White House with a fourth plane. The event is all over the media (again) and hard to miss. Nor do I want to miss it. I think we, as a nation and as individuals, need to remember and be reminded.
It's pretty common knowledge that I am a Baby Boomer, born after World War II to a military family. Parents in those days protected their children from the horrors of life. I think I was a teenager, for example, before I was exposed to the Holocaust. No one kept it from me. I was just blissfully naive of man's inhumanity to man, choosing--as a child of God--to believe that other children of God believed as I did. As a young adult, I endured news coverage of public assassinations, anti-war demonstrations-turned-violent, riots in the streets of our cities, and other atrocities that I never knew could possibly be visited on this great country of ours. Age hardens us to reality. It seems that we, as a society, are no longer as protective of our children when it comes to exposure to depravity. Or are we?
When the events of September 11, 2001, unfolded in front of us on television, I was on duty at school. I was alerted to the tragedies by email that I always checked between classes. One came in the form of a subscription devotional email. I had already read the daily devotional and had deleted it when finished. Why was there another?? It mentioned a report that two airplanes had been flown into the World Trade Center towers. "Please pray for the families...and for our country." I knew that one plane could have been an accident...but two? Not possible! The second email was from a friend of mine, and employee of the FAA who was on the job at the Air Route Traffic Control Center at Indy International Airport. "This is the real deal." The next class period was normally my free period, but that day I had been asked to sub that hour for a fellow teacher who had to be gone--a 6th/7th grade class in Industrial Arts. I hustled down there and immediately moved the class to the wood shop where a TV was set up. This was history in the making. I didn't want to deprive the students of watching, if that's what they wanted to do.
I wish I could say that the high school and middle school kids in the wood shop that day were interested in what was displayed on the news. They just weren't. Most of them preferred to visit with each other rather than watch. Maybe it was too much for their young minds to fathom...I don't know. Thankfully, they had the sense not to interfere with the teachers who were watching intently.
And what did we watch? We watched burning buildings and emergency vehicles scurrying in an attempt to get close enough to figure out how to effect rescues. We watched people standing in smoke-filled windows waving for help. We watched the stunned looks on the faces of perfectly-trained firemen in full call-out gear awaiting orders. And then we watched as the first building crumbled to the ground. The period ended and I had to go back to actual teaching, only to be glued to the TV when I got home. (There simply was nothing else to watch. All normal programming had been suspended.)
Aside from the obvious, the worst realizations for me had to do with the people who jumped from those buildings, some 100 stories up. TV showed people waving. TV showed people falling. Reporters and other witnesses talked about dozens of jumpers. I simply could not imagine the suffering and panic that went on in those people's minds before they decided how to die. I must not have been the only one so deeply disturbed by that because, within 24 hours, all mention of them stopped. No more pictures. No more reports. Someone pulled the plug, as did those in charge of television programming who decided which shows would be okay to air and which would be deemed offensive in such a time of collective deep shock and mourning. I'm proud of that. Very quickly, America's First Lady and child psychologists everywhere were discussing with the American public how to talk to young children about the events of the day and after. It was not lost on me that we were being protected--that maybe we hadn't become such a decadent society after all. That maybe some things were still sacred. Thank God for that.
How does one explain pure evil to a child? Like a child, myself, I confessed that I had never hated anyone in my life, but I hated the evil man behind the attacks of September 11, 2001. I prayed that God would destroy Osama Bin Laden, then begged His divine forgiveness for having such awful thoughts. I was not thinking as a Christian but as a human being.
It took ten years and many American lives to find and assassinate Osama Bin Laden. It was a military venture, which took the blame for my bad thoughts off my shoulders. And I must say, the whole thing was handled in the only way it could have been. Bin Laden was engaged in gunfire and killed in a raid on a compound in Pakistan just a few months ago. It was carefully determined that we had the right guy, and his body was disposed of at sea--supposedly in an "honorable" way acceptable to Muslims. There was a hue and cry from some American citizens that they wanted to see pictures of the body to be sure, etc...but we were being protected. We could simply have captured him and brought him back to the US, for what? Trial in American courts with American due process, only to be housed during appeals and while the Justice System tried to work? Then what? Execution by lethal injection? It would have been too much. If we had displayed his dead body, we would have been participating in sensationalism at its worst. Airing pictures would have been as bad and could incite retribution. (It was bad enough that there was rejoicing in the streets in some cities.) As it is, no individual soldier can/will claim credit for the assassination of Bin Laden...at least not now. History will eventually be revealed. We just aren't ready for it.
We are not done with terrorism. As long as there are cowards in the world who can only make their points by killing innocent people, this plague will be upon us. It's been ten years. Already, we have slipped back into some old ways of thinking. Long after I am gone, the students who were with me in school that day will be telling their grandchildren, "I remember when 9/11 happened," and the kids will roll their eyes, thinking their grandparents are old as dirt. And so it goes. But we, as Americans, must keep the memory of that day alive lest we have to relive it. No amount of obscuring the details can hide the awful reality. We are protected, perhaps, but no longer willing to take what our enemies dish out. We must always remember.
GOD BLESS AMERICA.
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