A lot of chatter today about the President’s speech last night, where Congressman Joe Wilson sounded his barbaric yawp, which he simply could not bring himself to hold back, and lots of other noise-worthy items in the news, but for me today was a day to begin quiet reflection.
You see, tomorrow is September 11. A day of reverence and remembrance. It is the eighth anniversary of that Awful day.
Recently I had the good fortune to visit the Newseum in Washington, DC. I highly recommend it, by the way. They have a little pavilion there honoring those who lived and died through 9/11, showing a very fine, respectful, short film on the events of that day. There is a riveting scene when the second plane, almost as if in a violent defiance, plunges before our eyes, into the second tower, deliberately angled so as to create the most damage. It was at that moment that the scales fell off. We knew for certain that we were attacked by vicious fiends.
There were other vivid scenes. A memorable one of the people in the towers at the windows considering their fates. We know now that many of them were more at ease to plunge to their deaths than to await the flames or what eventually would be the pulverization of the buildings as they collapsed, elevator style, into a sea of powder and debris, upending lower Manhattan, and our fanciful and free pre-September 11 world.
My heart broke again for those poor, innocent people who needlessly died that day, and for the brave men and women who rescued hundreds, many of whom gave their lives that day.
I was both forlorn and proud of and for my fellow Americans who bravely and gracefully arose as on eagles wings that day.
So why have we abandoned the fight? We have not yet vanquished this enemy. In fact, the enemy continues to thumb its nose at us. Our enemies hate our institutions. They are haters of freedom. They scorn those who love liberty. They are schoolyard bullies who need their noses bashed in, as the holders of the strings in Washington attempt to whistle past them in the hopes they may somehow, someway evaporate. But they won’t until we take them down.
I fear for a future with no purpose. Fibrillation. No clear direction, and so we dither. Like we did in Vietnam under a vigorous, intelligent, young Democrat President, a mere fifty years ago.
“The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who [died in the towers on 9/11] so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be …dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain…”
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