I Remember

In remembering the tragic events of 9/11, I came across a post from my college friend Ryan Kunz. I loved what he wrote, so I had to share with you all:

"History, by definition, happened in the past. Therefore, everything that has occurred before this precise moment in time has been, by that same definition, automatically enshrined in the glass case of history. Yet we rarely think of the events of our lives as history — history happened millennia ago, when Alexander fought the Persians; or centuries ago, when loyalists and rebels clashed at the battle of Bunker Hill; or decades ago, when one small step for a man was a giant leap for mankind. History happened when our grandparents were our age, like Pearl Harbor, or when our parents were young, like the Vietnam War. I seldom think of contemporary events as history — they’re simply news. Yet I do recall one instance when I caught a keen, painful, and unequivocal realization that I was witnessing history — real, bitter history, unsterilized by history books.          

On a September morning of my freshman year of high school, I was about to board the school bus when my dad called to tell us to turn on the news. Some plane had crashed into a famous building in New York. I didn’t have a chance to get a clearer view of the story until I arrived at school, where the events on the other side of the country were on everyone’s lips. The World Trade Center, they said, had been hit by not one but two airplanes. The planes were not, as I had imagined, out-of-control twin-engine Cessnas. They were commercial airliners, hijacked by terrorists.

In my first period, the teacher never bothered to touch his planned curriculum. He left the TV on and occasionally scribbled important names or concepts on the whiteboard with sober silence. I remember one particular name written on the board, now emblazoned in my memory like a brand in flesh. I had never heard the name before: Osama bin Laden. There were others: Rudy Giuliani. United Airlines Flight 93. Al-Qaeda. I watched the towers fall. The next few classes were the same. More news came, a blur of tragedy and desperate newsreels. The Pentagon had been hit. The downed plane in Pennsylvania had perhaps been headed for the Capitol. A man from nearby Sugar City was missing in the wreckage of the Pentagon. The casualty estimates bombarded us.

We have been granted an intimate but unasked for glimpse into the machine that is history. We have witnessed the inception of events whose echoes will forever be felt. We have been forced to find in the events of the past kindred spirits of others who have survived man’s inhumanity toward his fellow man. Ladies and gentleman, boys and girls — we are the children of 9/11. We live in a world shaped by the hope and despair of that day. Our existence has been tempered and molded by the unmapped reverberations of the attacks. Like it or not, this is the legacy that has been gifted for us to do what we may.

Like the movers of history we’ve read about in stale volumes in the classroom, we are in the thick of history and therefore possess the inherent ability to shape the future. You and I, the children of 9/11, have been born during this time that we may be ideally placed to pick up the pieces of our shattered world.

President Abraham Lincoln said at Gettysburg:

“It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

As Lincoln said, the task is now ours. From the dead we take up the cause. It has fallen to us to take this world we’ve inherited and do what we can to see that servants of evil of the kind we saw on 9/11 are frustrated at every turn. And whatever tragedies we may have to endure, we may be assured that there is a God who watches over us, who wishes us the best and wants us to succeed. While many may question the probability of such a being presiding over a world that brims with filth, violence, and iniquity, we can know that He has not left this world to die at the whims of men like the terrorists of 9/11. He left this world a secret weapon: Us."  -Ryan Kunz

Thank you to all the servicemen and women, along with all others that give all they have to protect our country and our freedom. Thank you to their families, for sharing them with the rest of us.

God Bless America!