Do you remember where you were on November 22, 1963? Or July 20, 1969? How about January 17, 1991?
Or September 11, 2001?
All of these dates are profound and memorable dates in my lifetime. The first was JFK's assassination. The second was Armstrong walking on the moon. The third was the start of the First Iraq War.
And the last was the day I saw two skyscrapers crashed, the Pentagon lost a wall, and terrorists attacked causing these disasters and the deaths of 2,996 people, including 2,977 victims and 19 hijackers, who committed murder–suicide. And they used passenger planes to do this.
What followed was sorrow and grief for a nation who lost loved ones senselessly, and are still feeling the pain to this day. And then, two irrational wars which ended shamefully for our country, with thousands more lives lost, many thousands more permanently disabled and billions of dollars of treasure gone.
And for what?
We will pay for many more years for this horrible disaster. Some say it was done for the “greater good”. The greater good of what? Sorrow? Pain? And for how much longer?
As a nation, we will NEVER recover from this pointless act. It has been twenty-three years and we are still “fighting terror.” But not against those who attacked us.
Instead, we are suspicious of our fellow Americans, by frisking them at airports, demanding some mindless proof of patriotism when getting a loan, requiring us open our pocketbooks and emptying our pockets at ballgames.
And stripping us of our freedoms and liberties for the sake of some false sense of security.
As Benjamin Franklin is quoted to have said, “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary security, deserve neither liberty nor security.”
That is the ultimate legacy of 9/11. That is the one I will NEVER FORGET.
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