This American flag
came together in the weeks following 9/11. Cutting up a few magazines proved a
fruitful if elementary way to process the dark jumbled thoughts swimming
through my then young-adult brain. This response hangs in my classroom and has done
so for years, and I hardly even notice it anymore.
I have now lived half
of my life in a post 9/11 world, and some folks who were born after that day,
or who were simply too young to process the tragedy, sometimes question our
collective remembrance this time of year. That’s understandable. Such
historically heavy events, whether they are terrible, like Pearl Harbor, or
wonderful, like the moon landing, are truly “I-guess-you-had-to-be-there”
moments, and reflecting back on that particularly terrible moment reminds me of
two tandem lessons:
For starters, life
ends.
Life will end. It may
end months after the diagnosis or weeks after the accident - it might end
without warning on a bright autumn day. But it will end, and before that day
comes, we will also lose many among us we don’t want to live without. That is
the first lesson 9/11 reiterated to us -
brutally- and it is a hard, hard lesson.
Life does end, but heroes are real.
Heroes are real and
they are all around us, and that is the second lesson. Despite the cynicism of
our age, and the graft and the chaos, heroes absolutely exist. 9/11 also proved
that. While thousands of people were rushing away from the carnage,
firefighters and other first-responders were marching towards the scene. Many
of them - over four hundred of them - were sprinting towards their own last day
on earth. Heroes also overtook the terrorists on United Airlines Flight 93 and
brought that plane down, sacrificing themselves, undoubtedly saving thousands
of more lives. Heroes do exist, and don’t let anyone tell you differently. Some
of them look like you and some don’t, but the capacity for that courage is also
part of the human experience.
Many
Americans came together in the weeks after 9/11 in a way that seems almost
unfathomable now. What happened to us?
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment