I watched a documentary on it again last night. I do this every year to remind myself of the terrible tragedy that could have been deterred if we had stricter border control. The lives that were lost. The men and women who were innocents and first responders that lost their lives.
After the tragedy this country was so united. There was no talk of black or white, we all had a common enemy and common grief. The shock was almost too hard to bear. How the families did it is truly amazing.
I saw those jump from the highest floors and prayed that they were unconscious shortly after leaping.
We will never know if we have stopped another terror attack of this level with our Immigration laws, Homeland Security and CIA. Let's pray we never have to fear that kind evil again.
i was going to come in here and start a thread like this, but since you already did, i'll simply join in.
it was a day like any other. get up, get ready for work and wait for my carpool ride. in short order we were on our way to work and my friend stopped at a convenience store to get some smokes. on the way out he was talking about seeing a plane fly into the WTC. he thought, as i did as well, it was a small plane that got lost, or the like. we flipped it over to NPR radio and learned what was really going in.
when we got to work it was minutes before seeing the 2nd plane fly into the 2nd building. from there it was watching the news. bush at an elementary school trying to play it cool w/o scaring the kids before leaving to figure out what was going on and who was responsible. so many things changed that day and because of it, are still in effect changing. i for one simply could not fathom the choices people trapped in the WTC had to make that day. we saw a few of those choices and those are things you simply can't "un-see".
that day, we were just an attacked people. not black, not white. certainly not nazis. hate for each other was simply not to be found. *WE* were hit as a country and responded as such. we came together to face this. jews were helping muslims and that story still hits home to me in a manner that i would hope would hit all. our hate for each other, ranging from petty to generational, melted away. we were in this together and "never forget" rang true.
for a little while.
hoping we can find that feeling again on our own this time around.