My Thoughts on 9/11...

 "Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him." - Aldous Huxley

I admit, I was a bit unplugged from all of the media focus on 9/11 yesterday.  Part of me didn't want to think about it - not because I don't care, but because I don't always believe looking back is healthy.  At least, not in the way most people do it.  I saw Facebook statuses all over the place that were still full of hate - and that's part of why 9/11 happened in the first place.  Do we never learn?

What happened on September 11, 2001 was a tragedy in a manner so massive it's hard to contemplate.  I will never forget being woken up by my college roommate (who recently passed away) because there had been "a plane crash", and then seeing calls from my parents, checking in on me.  In my morning fuzz, I didn't realize "a plane crash" was a very big deal.  I stumbled into my (other) roommate's room and looked at the TV.  Within three minutes, the second plane came out of nowhere and hit the second tower, and we suddenly knew how bad things really were.

Being the wife of a firefighter/first responder now, my heart aches not only for the innocent people who simply went to work that day and never made it home, but for the rescue workers who dove into a building to save lives, and ended up losing their own.  If Wes had been a firefighter during those hard days, I wonder if he would have felt compelled to go to New York to assist in the search and rescue?

And yet, I can not feel hate.  I don't hate Muslims, or the citizens of Afghanistan or Pakistan.  I don't even want revenge.  I don't think revenge brings healing, not one tiny bit.  While feeling a healthy type of pride for your home country is not a bad thing, the hate, arrogance, and ignorance that Americans (and citizens of other countries, as well, though Americans seem to be notorious for it) can often show is likely what causes us to have such strained relationships with other countries.  We can not be good global citizens with such attitudes.  We want other countries to respect us, but we don't feel respect for them.  This simply isn't logical.  We have a horrific view of "propaganda" (the word itself calls to mind Hitler's media), and yet, we have no problem telling our children that America is the only country worth a damn.  How is this OK?  How is it healthy?

I would never condone or accept what the people behind 9/11 did to our country.  But I would also never condone or accept America doing the same to them.  It creates a spiraling pattern of hate and violence that will simply NEVER HELP ANYTHING.


So, yesterday, on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, I didn't want to cry, or concentrate on what we lost.  If that makes me cold and unfeeling, so be it.  I wanted to think about the future, and how we could be BETTER.  More educated, less ignorant, with a much better perspective on the world and its inhabitants.  After all, America makes up less than 5% of the world's population.  If we don't respect the other 95%, we are really setting ourselves up for disaster - economically, culturally, educationally, and in many other ways.


I hope the memory of what happened on September 11th makes us all look to the future with unveiled eyes - if  we don't, then those lives really were lost in vain.