September 11, 2007 – Six Years Later
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Sep 11, 2007
The anniversary of the attack on the Twin Towers is upon us again, and yes, I'm still mad about it.
You know, one of the premises that most people live off is the thing about wanting to get back at whoever has caused us harm in some fashion, whether it's us personally, our family members, or friends of ours, sometimes even strangers. Something that this attack didn't allow us is to really get even with the people who did it, because the people who actually carried it out killed themselves, and the people who planned it are still on the loose. Sure, we went into Afghanistan and cleared out the people who helped the guy who planned it have a base of relatively safety, but that wasn't quite the same. And Iraq,... well, that speaks for itself, even now.
We're unsatisfied, and that's a shame because it gets in the way of a true healing. When my dad passed away, I basically shut down for six months, then I started to come out of that shell. I still feel it on most days, but I can reconcile it in my mind because I know where he is, and can go see him. There wasn't anything nefarious about it, so there was no one to blame (well, maybe Agent Orange, but that's a different tale).
But this thing in NYC,... man. And then, there are those people who want to, in my mind, trivialize it. The conspiracy theorists who think Bush did it (please), or the Israelis did it to throw blame on someone else (give me a break!), or that someone else helped the building to come tumbling down by blowing it up themselves (sheesh!). I'm sorry, but can all these people be serious, as if my eyes didn't see at least that second plane, live mind you, going into the second tower, and all the chaos that ensued, then all those buildings coming down the way they did?
And now, there are some people who think the date itself is giving too much power to terrorists, and that we should move it around like it's Thanksgiving or Memorial Day or Labor Day; if this isn't the stupidest thing I've ever heard. I'm going to address it this way. We don't move around the date that Pearl Harbor was attacked; we don't move around the dates we dropped A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; we don't move around the date this country decided it was going to be a country; we don't move around the date Kennedy was assassinated; we don't move around the date the federal building was bombed in Oklahoma City; we don't move around the date that Columbia exploded in the skies; we don't move around Christmas; we don't move around the date the Civil War, or the two World Wars, ended.
And we're not going to forget what happened on this day until there's been some kind of resolution, or until we've gone a couple of generations past this date. I mean, I've learned that many young people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki don't even know their cities were the only two hit with atomic bombs. If they can forget that, we'll probably forget this date one day also.
And that's a shame.