Why Rembering 9/11 is More than Recalling the Event

On past 9/11 anniversaries, I have been chided, particularly by my Liberal friends, for my affection towards Darryl Worley's September 11 tribute, Have You Forgotten.

No one, they chuckle, has forgotten 9/11.

Recalling the event itself is not enough. We need to remember and embrace the emotional toll that the attacks had on us as individuals and as a nation. We need to remember, as Mr. Worley sings, how it felt that day.

We must never forget the range of emotions that welled in so many of us that morning: the confusion, the horror, the sorrow, the fear, the anger that flowed through us all as we watched the events on TV or in person, or later in a recording.

We need to remember the sense of purpose that drew us all together as a nation. Just a few months after one of the most contentious elections in the nations' history, we were able to put our political divisions aside as President Bush stood atop the rubble, bullhorn in hand, in a calling-to-arms that this nation has not heard for generations.

We need to remember who did this to us and why. In this politically correct world of walking on the safest, thinnest rhetorical line as possible, in an era when our leaders routinely change the terminology of the day, not in an attempt to change history, rather to divert blame and tamper our anger, we cannot forget that this attack, and too many others, were done in a perverted interpretation of Islam. It is they, not the faith itself, who has declared us the enemy.

And we need to remember that this enemy of ours will never stop; they measure victory in years, decades, perhaps centuries. As long as we remain vigilant, their attacks will be small and their victories few.

But, most of all, we must remember the thousands of innocent people who lost their lives that day. The people in the planes, the people in the towers. People no different than you and I, who were going about their day as any other. Going to work, going on vacation. Innocence lost to evil. In all those offices, there must have been someone in his last days at work before retirement; there must have been people there for their first week of work; there may have been delivery people who were there only out of fate; there may have been people there to interview for a job, who had never set foot in one of those buildings before. On those planes, there were people who traveled for work, people going on vacation, perhaps the first in years. Individuals, families. The flight crews who came to work that day as any other, perhaps with plans for later in the day when their flight inevitably touched down.

We must always honor those who gave their lives in a vain attempt to save others. The first responders: the police, fire fighters, people on the street who sacrificed to give aid, those who "went down like heros in that Pennsylvania field" to stop another target from being hit.
We must remember those who sat at home, talking to a loved one on the phone just before dying, the people who watched loved ones trapped in a collapsing tower, those who never heard from their loved ones again. Those who lost a husband, a wife, a mother, a father, a sister, a brother, a child (young or old), a friend.

They, too, are victims. People also like us who kissed their loved one goodbye with a promise to see him or her later in the day. The dinner plans that never came to be; the first date that never happened; the theater tickets never used; the lives that will never be the same.

These were people just like us, who did nothing wrong, but paid the ultimate price to those who did, for no other reason than hatred and true evil.

That is what we must never forget; I for one, never will.