I don’t really know what to say this September 11th that hasn’t almost certainly been said somewhere else, and most likely, better. I am not always the most eloquent human being when it comes to commemorations and memorials, but I do believe them to be universally important to Americans as a society. It may be horribly cliche, but it is also far too true: those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. Another September 11 should not and cannot happen to this country.
I look at my seven year old daughter this morning. In 2001 she was nearly two, and I remember thinking about all the children that went to daycare on the lowest floors of the World Trade Center. Children who didn’t all escape from the towers. Children like my Hannah. Say what you will about the United States, and all its faults, both as a country and a military body, but the United States doesnt’t and never will seek out and destroy the children of its “enemies”. America does not kidnap hundreds of non-combatants and murder them in an attack, suicide or otherwise. These are the actions of monsters, of people who are pure evil. We should not even try to understand these actions; it would be like trying to understand the genocide perpetrated by Nazi Germany. No good reason exists for these actions and none ever will.
I think less emphasis on this day should be put towards the actions of our leadership, Republican or Democrat, or on the level of the country’s security six years later. We need to remember the approximately 3,000 who died six years ago in New York, Pennsylvania, and the Pentagon. We need to remember the lesson that evil allowed to flourish will only perpetrate more evil.
But most of all we need to fight and pray that nothing like the attacks of September 11, 2001 ever occur in this great country again.
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