Six Years Later

From now until the end of time this will be a special day in the course of the year. This will be a day long remembered, if not because of any patriotic or nationalist matter, but because it was a day of extreme human depravity, showing us at our worst, but also at our best.

This is a day on which we should never forget the lessons of, because they are lessons long remembered, lessons that teach us to be prepared for the most extreme of situations, for they may sometime come to bear. It also showed us the best of what we can be as a people, we can be people who run into the fire of a burning building that is about to come down so one more person can make it out, we are people who line up to give blood and do what little we can in the aftermath of a horror, and we are a people that will stand up in one voice and say your not going to do this to us, as Americans, and as humans.

We have come a long way since 2001, we are no longer united behind a single task, because that task was done and we differed on what to do next, which is reasonable and expected. We have begun the end of our grief and mourning as we begin to put buildings back up where the Twin Towers fell. We have gone back to the petty bickering and annoyances that define our politics. These were all going to happen, and the fact that they have happened show that we have accepted life beyond 9/11 and have learned to live with it.

We are in a period of transition about this day, from a day that brought horrid images screaming back to our face, to a date that we remember for the horrors that occurred. The difference is how we thought of September 11th 5 years ago and how we look at December 7th today. We remember the vile act, we remember that it caused us to unite and accomplish a great feat, but the anger and fear aren’t there anymore, and in the end that is what should be happening.

We should never forget this day, or the 2,997 people whose lives were ended in a heartbeat, but we cant continue to live for that day, and I think it is healthy that we don’t anymore, as long as we never forget what happened and what it shows us we must do. May God bless those souls, and all of ours.