September 11, 2001

In a little less than two weeks it will be the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11.  National Geographic has a series on this week called “Remembering 9/11.”  The show they have on tonight “9/11 Where Were You?”  For me that part of the process is simple, I was at home watching planes hit the World Trade Center and initially thought I had left my television on a movie channel.  Then the gut wrenching reality kicked in, this was not a made for t.v. movie it was real life. 

Suddenly the world became a different place.  A plane hit the Pentagon.  I knew people that worked there who have never been the same since.  A group of flight attendants and passengers on Flight 93 took control of their plane, slamming it into a field in Somerset County Pennsylvania not far from where I was born.  My great Aunt attended the very first Memorial Service there just a few days later.  Life was no longer the open joyful thing it was before.  The future was no longer a bright place.
Now we find that the men and women who went in to help after the attack to find the remains of loved ones lost by others are dying from diseases caused by the caustic material they breathed for months while trying to ensure that every person who perished was found.  Nobody is willing to help them.  Our bureaucratic government has hog tied the hands that might help these heroic men and women live longer lives but there is haggling over the money that is endless.
In circumspection reliving this, watching it over again, I wonder when we will remember the lessons we should have learned that day.  I wonder when we will realize that we are human beings who should simply accept and respect each other as human beings.  Our differences have cost too many lives.  I wonder when we will realize that this planet we live on is one planet not many.  Our differences have cost too many lives.  I wonder when we will realize that no idea is so perfect, so pure that anyone should be willing to commit murder to further it.  Our differences have cost too many lives, our differences have cost too many lives, our differences have cost too many lives.
Let us all take the time at 8:46 am on September 11 to remember that we must heal this planet, we must heal ourselves, we must heal the future, our differences have cost too many lives.