On September 11, 2001, I was teaching an English class when another teacher knocked on my door and advised me to turn on the TV. We, the students and I, watched in horror as that now infamous film of the second plane flying into the World Trade Center replayed over and over. By the time the yearbook staff checked in for class around noontime, they ask to turn the TV from the school news channel to one of the major networks. The scene was the same; the commentary harsher. We could not take our eyes from the horror.
I have another vivid memory thereafter. When I judged yearbooks the following summer, the farther a school was from Ground Zero, the greater the coverage of 9/11 events. Those directly impacted by the tragedy, reported basic facts. The festering wounds hurt too much to probe deeper.
Saturday marks the 20th anniversary of 9/11. For those of us old enough to remember that date, we recall how the nation united against a common enemy. Even with our differences, we accepted government rules established to protect our safety. We didn’t like the new regulations, especially about air travel, but we accepted the fact that they were instituted not to trample on our “rights,” but rather to protect us from those who would do us harm. Many of our young men and women rushed to join the military to bring the terrorists to justice.
Veteran journalist Mike Kelly, one of the first newsmen on scene at the Twin Towers on that fateful day, has spent the past two decades trying to make sense of what happened. His search has taken him to memorial services, funerals, Guantanamo, Iraq and Malaysia. He even enrolled in some religion classes to try to understand what the terrorists were thinking.
As the anniversary nears, he writes about the multi-piece puzzle he’s still trying to solve. He writes, “Nearly half of the nearly 3,000 people who perished on Sept. 11, 2001 at Manhattan’s World Trade Center were never identified. Their bodies were pulverized, ground into dust or vaporized. After 20 years, modern science has still not been able to decipher the DNA codes.”
But the greater puzzle to him lies in how Americans have shifted from being so united in purpose a mere 20 years ago to a fractured society today fighting one another about how to confront another mortal enemy.
Kelly writes, “With most stories, I can usually sense a finish line of sorts. An understandable and logical journalistic narrative tumbles naturally into well-defined story-telling boundaries — a verdict in a trial, for instance, or a winner and a loser in an election…I sensed that the nation would find its balance again. After all, this was America. We experienced plenty of hardships, from hurricanes to floods to mass shootings — even a Civil War and centuries of slavery, followed by decades of institutional racism known as Jim Crow. We always seemed to find a way to land on our feet. Now I wonder.”
Despite Kelly’s cynicism, we once again have a chance to unite as we face this merciless foe. This time the enemy doesn’t have a face. It’s a tiny invisible virus passed from one human to another through our sneezing, coughing, even breathing.
Death toll from this disease in America inches toward 700,000, and in the world, over 3.5 million. Stop. Contemplate these numbers. We joined hands to battle the enemy after 3,000 Americans had been murdered. But, we can’t come together when hundreds of thousands lives have been taken by another adversary and our own life remains in jeopardy?
Hasn’t the time come for us Americans to join forces to combat COVID-19 with the same passion that we fought Osama bin Laden and his gang of terrorists? Otherwise, our very rights to protest injustices are in jeopardy; our children are back to distance school or in the hospital, and hindsight about “woulda, shoulda, coulda” grows stronger daily.
Be proud to be an American: wear a mask; get a vaccination; these are more consequential signs of the American fortitude that we all claim as our heritage than wearing the Old Glory lapel pin which became the proud symbol of unity 20 years ago.
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