Devils and Dust

This time Thursday, we will be talking about the twenty-fourth anniversary of the attacks of 9/11. We have a generation growing old that has never known what our nation was like before the attacks.

We will relive every moment of every memory that got us here. Where we go after that, I don't know. I've spent the last couple of days trying to sort out the previous score of years, aware I'm a long way from home, attempting a return to the familiar and the known, even when the sky is bible-black and the direction unknown.

It feels like a dream remembering when the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union and its vassal states imploded. So many of us rushed into the streets to celebrate being alive at that historic moment with total strangers who were celebrating the very same thing. We have history books to tell us those feelings are real and that those things happened.

What we forgot when we exulted that now anything was possible was that everything could now be taken away. That those who had nothing to live for would be able to invent something to die for, and then they would want us to die for it, as well.

Each of us knows someone from our school, our work, our family, our town who has served in uniform in the last two decades, probably more often than one tour of duty, and as long as we don't think about any of that too hard or too long, it nearly makes sense. Only when there are moments that you stand stock-still and silent, when someone you know is hurt or worse, do the doubts creep in and you wonder if what you see is really what you get.

How far can we go on faith alone? At least twenty-four years because there's the marker up ahead. Perhaps you should choose to not only remember and make a difference, but be the difference.  
Memor vir, vos es pulvis quod tergum ut pulvis vos vadum reverto.

-bill kenny