6 Years Ago Today, the world changed. Thousands of innocent lives were lost in the blink of an eye, and tens of thousands of lives who had been touched by those lost souls were forever scarred. We were all changed that day. There is not a corner of the world that was not changed that day.
I remember P getting a text message on his phone - he got news feeds on it. We were still relatively new to our house, and did not have a tv downstairs. I ran upstairs to see the news, thinking it had to be a commuter plane. I turned it on as the 2nd tower was hit. I started screaming. Then I started doing a mental tally of where everyone was: stepmom at home. Father headed downtown to a large print show at one of the country's largest convention centers (cell phones overloaded, couldn't get ahold of him). Cousins at home. Aunt and Uncle in Turkey on vacation. Mother...oh shoot, where is she...oh yes, home from her Japan flight the night before. When they said some of the planes had to be United jets, I had to call her and wake her to tell her some of her coworkers were likely dead.
It was the day some more of our country's, and the world's, innocence died. It was the day where we all for the first time experienced truly quiet skies overhead. A deafening silence. It was the first time that we lived in fear, where we could empathize with what the people in Israel, Sudan, East Timor, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Iraq, live with every day of their lives. It was the first time that we were afraid to be on our street corners. It was an unknown and traumatizing experience, the realization of how our world had changed.
Innocents died that day. Innocents of Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Agnostic, Atheist and every other religion. It was a day that a few bad people who were guided to these misdeeds by a man who is charismatic and intelligent destroyed so much of the soul of this country. A man who could guide them to commit these atrocities by feeding on their fear, their misguided simplistic education of what Americans stand for (or the lack of understanding that we all stand for different things), and a misappropriation of religious beliefs.
Sadly, these events have turned the world an even darker place since then. Fear, suspicion, and mistrust rule. Sadly, today many innocents are still dying. Innocents who had no hand in what took place in 2001. Go after the people that support and assist the people who did this. Punishment can not be harsh enough for those people. Murder is never acceptable to further anyone's agenda. The innocents dying today though, wherever in the world they are, do not deserve to die anymore than the people in those planes and the towers and the Pentagon deserved to die 6 years ago.
Later tonight or tomorrow, I'll start my travel log of all the beautiful things in this world that inspire the soul.
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