When the Sun Rises Tomorrow

I regard calendars more as mirrors reflecting what has been rather than as windows allowing us to look forward. I’ve known that tomorrow is September 11, a day whose arrival you dread months before it gets here. A day when all words fail and in the silence that remains are only remembrance of dark deeds. 

September 11 is much more than a day on a calendar page where memories of thirteen years ago remain as fresh as the instant at which they first happened.

So overwhelming are our individual and collective recollections of what we've come to call 9/11, nearly forgotten at times are the human beings beyond New York’s World Trade Center, the deaths and damage at the Pentagon and the total destruction near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, the end of Flight 93.

Long ago, somewhere in our shared history we forgot that people who have nothing to live for will always find something to die for; and then they will want you to die for it, too. 9/11 makes sure we shall now always remember.

As Sir Winston Churchill observed a lifetime before carnage and catastrophe rained down on New York’s Lower East Side, 'a fanatic is someone who cannot change his mind and will not change the subject.' The pain of learning that lesson could only be exceeded by the pain of failing to remember what we have learned.

Tomorrow’s black spot on our calendar is nothing compared to the hurt that will never heal. For anyone with friends and family who went to work that day, boarded a plane, rode a bus, were those selfless emergency responders, or anyone else who had an errand taking them into the death and destruction, the pain will never ease and the memories will never cease.

For some, 9/11 is a national day of service (to others and to the ideals upon which we were founded). That speaks to both who we are and who we should strive to be: the greatest nation on earth that so many others everywhere believe us to be.

We will triumph, as a nation, as a culture, as a way of life- not because we have more bombs and bullets, though there's a place and, again, pressing reasons for both (and each of us knows young men and women in, or heading into, harm's way at this moment who need both) but because of who we are in moments of great peril, of eminent danger and in continuing sorrow and loss.

We will triumph because we define ourselves by listening to our better angels and focusing on what we have yet to do, not dwelling on the evil visited upon us. And because of that we shall always win, and those who hate us will always lose.

As Bruce Springsteen offered, "Spirits above and behind me/Faces gone, black eyes burnin' bright/May their precious blood forever bind me/Lord as I stand before your fiery light."

-bill kenny