My kids will never know the joy of running to the gate to greet Daddy after a business trip. They’ll never live in a world where the Twin Towers are a distinct part of the NYC skyline. They’ll never live in a world where terrorists don’t exist. And that kinda makes me sad.
BUT I can have hope they’ll live in a world where terrorists lose power, where people band together to work hard for a common goal. I can hope that they learn to love unconditionally, even when the people they love seem like their enemies. I can hope they learn to see beyond the differences, recognize similarities, and celebrate differences. When they meet someone who shared differing beliefs, I can hope they respect them as a human and not marginalize them because they are different or my kids think they’re wrong. I can hope my kids don’t think others beliefs are wrong or invalid.
Sixteen years have come and gone since our nation’s foundation was rocked. I remember exactly what I was doing. It was career/college day at a local university. My class went to explore options for after high school. We were silly sophomores. They had the TVs on in the lobby tuned to the news. I had no idea what was happening. I just saw smoke coming out of the Towers, and then the second plane hit. The towers eventually collapsed, hundreds dead, fear and uncertainty reigned. The trip back to school that afternoon was different. I was still clueless what had just happened. The other kids were begging the teachers to change the radio station so they could listen to music, but instead of music, Z102 (the station they requested) was playing the news, with grim solemnity, and the teachers were listening intently, unwilling to change the station. What did this mean? I zoned out the radio since it wasn’t something I particularly enjoyed on a normal day, and turned on my Discman listening to who knows what CD as I retreated into myself. That afternoon, I remember walking in the halls by the library after chemistry singing, “It’s the end of the world as we know it,” not realizing how true that was. The world, as I knew it, ended, but we continued on.
As a young adult, I was always curious about other beliefs. I rarely took something at face value until I could learn more about it, and this scary and very real event and season in our nations history in no way changed that. Somehow, in all the wisdom of my 15 years of life, I determined to not make an entire religion the bad guys. I sought to understand, and I still do. It’s still easy to clump a group, whether it’s a religion, political party, or nationality of people, into a “bad guy” category, to dislike and distrust them completely just because of one of their adjectives, but here’s the deal. Our enemy is not flesh and blood. These men who attacked the nation, who claimed to be doing Allah’s work, are not representative of the entire religion or region, and they ARE NOT our enemy. Even now, refugees, immigrants, neo-Nazis, white supremecists, ISIS… They are still not our enemy. They live. They breath. They are flesh and blood.
Seek to understand. Seek to find a common ground. Build each other up. Work together. Celebrate differences. We do hard things. We also remember. We remember the men and women and children who died on the flights, who died in the towers. We remember the men and women who have fought and died to maintain our freedoms. We remember the first responders whose first reaction was to run INTO the burning buildings to save those they could. We remember those who lost their mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, aunts, uncles, friends. We remember the pain that we felt collectively as a nation when our identity was radically shaken. We remember.
And we will not forget.
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