When I wake tomorrow, it will be to another bright and clear, early-Fall morning, as it is apt to be in New York Washington and Pennsylvania, just as it was on September 11 in 2001. I was at work in Atlanta that morning and happened by a crowded, but mute, conference room watching images from the twin World Trade Center towers as they burned and then crumbled. Much of my work in that era dealt with disaster contingency planning, but we had never imagined a day like that.
Needing something to do other than to watch endless repeats of the second plane implode, I went home to be with my children, knowing they would see these images and would need what comfort and understanding I could offer. As I sat with them, I thought that that day would change everything for them and our country, and that perhaps the new Millennium might have actually begun that day.
I expected that the attacks of the day would galvanize and unite what was even then a badly fractured nation, as Pearl Harbor had once done. As we all now know, our reaction was turned from targeted response to what we seem to do best, making massive attacks and invasions at targets with too little relation to the attacks. The chance to forge national unity seemed squandered, at least to me.
As the years have passed, the less-than-half truth of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction devolved into out-and-out lies in the news and social media, accepted by too many because they wanted, or perhaps needed, something to believe in. It seemed, and does now more than ever, that the more outrageous a claim the more it is deemed by some an article of faith and shared identity among those who have fallen behind in changing times, an irrational desire to tear it all down, rather than accept truth and work together for a better future. Instead a vocal minority have tried to stop the constitutional process and put themselves and others at grave risk by refusing vaccines. Such steps beg the question, “Did Bin Laden in some perverse way actually win?” The question is, of course, rhetorical but worth some introspective thought. As for me, the answer is a resounding “NO,” and I hope you agree.
In times like now in which billionaires compete to be the first in space, rather than build libraries like Andrew Carnegie, I find myself jaded even me more than a bit, and yet, even after all the failures of this Millennium, I have to believe that Lincoln’s call to the “better angels of our nature” can still ring true. We embrace dissent, but we are too great a people to be brought down by wrong ideas, even when acted on by the misguided.
Much has been written and more will be tomorrow about September 11 and the ensuing two decades, and should be, as we share our journey and seek answers. When all is said and done, I hope we still see those two towers of light and all we can still be.
