Remembering Is the Easy Part

This is the day that no amount of time passage will allow any wounds to ever heal. This is the day whose arrival you dread months before it gets here. This is the day when words fail and dark deeds done by cowards take center stage. This is the day whose memories, no matter what the date on the calendar is, are as fresh as the instant in which they first happened.

The recollections of first hearing that an airplane had crashed into the World Trade Center (immediate reaction was how could this happen?) chased but moments later by the announcement that a second aircraft had also hit the complex (and now the how was replaced by why?).

The mad rush to computers, servers overloaded and shutdown, followed by the dash to television sets as the world slowly joined a seance of beyond-epic proportions and the scale and scope of the catastrophe in the heart of the capital of the world started to be realized and recognized. "Believers and infidels are fighting in the heat, while bodies of the innocent are covered with a sheet."

So overwhelming are individual and collective recollections of what we've come to call 9/11 that almost forgotten are the human beings, the dead and damaged at the Pentagon, and the total destruction near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, that marked the fiery end of Flight 93. 

At some point long ago 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. But 9/11 makes sure we shall always remember. As Winston Churchill observed a lifetime before the carnage arrived on the Lower East Side, 'a fanatic is someone who cannot change his mind and will not change the subject.' 

The black spot on the calendar is nothing compared to the black hole and the hurt that never heals in the heart. For those with friends and family who went off to work that day, boarded a plane, rode a bus, had an errand that took them into one of the buildings attacked, were emergency responders or in circumstances of which, perhaps, only Thornton Wilder could conceive, the pain never ceases and the memories never dull.

But for some removed from the epicenter, who began as unwitting spectators, as we move farther from the actual day of the event the ache dulls, they lose sight of the pain in the soul of America would do well to remember others like Susan Retik, working to light candles. I came across this profile a decade ago and would encourage you to spend a moment considering how you can join those who've chosen to be a light rather than a horn.

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 for both (and I know young men and women in, and heading into, harm's way at this moment who will need both), but because of who we are in moments of great peril, of imminent danger and in enormous 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 will always win, and those who hate us will always lose."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