Twenty Years Now

 

"No Day Shall Erase You From The Memory Of Time"

Virgil  (National September 11 Museum)

Photo Credit:  Jin S. Lee

Twenty years ago, on a morning with a sky so blue and so bright that it almost appeared to go on forever, the trajectory of the lives of countless people and the trajectory of America was inexorably altered.  If you were alive then - and old enough to remember what life in America felt like before September 11, 2001, then you are old enough to understand what is meant when someone speaks of "pre-9/11" and "post-9/11" America.  

If you were alive then, and old enough to remember the events of that terrible Tuesday morning and the mornings that followed immediately thereafter, then you are also old enough to remember that for what proved to be far too fleeting a moment we did not view each other through the prisms of "red" Americans / "blue" Americans or "conservative" Americans / "liberal" Americans.  We were simply Americans.  We were occupants of the same big canoe, paddling together in unison and in the same direction, honoring our unspoken and unwritten vow to look out for one another. 

 

We were not a people of cancel culture or faux outrage.  We were a people who had taken a body blow, whose number included those who had suffered grievous, irreparable harm, and who went to bed on September 11, 2001 knowing that time was too precious to waste bickering over imagined slights and fabricated grievances.  We lived in a world where those who hated us not only vowed to kill us, they fulfilled their vow. 

Two decades removed from the murderous events of September 11, 2001 we must not only never forget those who were killed that morning, and those who have died since due to that day's events, we must also remember who we were and where we stood in the hours, days, weeks, and even months that followed.  We honor the memory of those who died not merely by speaking their names aloud or writing remembrances to them.  We honor their memory by being the best version of ourselves that we can be and by being good to one another.  

May those who suffered a personal loss on this very day twenty years ago feel at least a modicum of peace, grieving an eternal loss and salving a wound that shall never completely close.  May those of us blessed enough to have not suffered such a loss continue to do our best to honor not simply the memory of those killed on September 11, 2001 but also to honor the lives of those they left far too soon and who have had to battle on through their day-to-day without them every day thereafter.   

Never forget.  Not today.  Not tomorrow.  Never. 

-AK