Sunday, September 11, 2011

Remember

I have a four year old daughter.  To her, 9/11 will always be something she reads about in history books, sees on film, and hears about it from others.  She won't experience that feeling, that day, the days afterward.



Thank God. 

But there's a part of me that wonders if that shared sense of pain and loss and anger is something we've lost, and if that's a good thing or a bad thing.  I don't know whether it saddens me, or just makes me feel old... but within five years, there's going to be entire generation of people in college and of voting age who only know of the World Trade Center from pictures and stories.
They won't know the feelings of shock and terror that we felt, and that's a good thing.  But they won't also feel the same emotional response we had at all the moments that gave us heart.


What 9/11 proved, beyond all doubt, is that there is evil in this world -- terrible, horrible, searing hatred that cannot be defined or explained by words.  The response to 9/11 that day  -- from our first responders, from the brave patriots on Flight 93, from all the people who lost loved ones but soldiered on, from everyone -- proved that there is good in this world... and that the good in the world redeems and saves us, even in the faced of such hatred.

I remember a friend in the days after 9/11 lamenting how this could have happened, and what we did to deserve this.  I remember answering that latter question in anger that we did nothing to deserve this, that evil simply attacks good because good exists.  But I never answered the unspoken question -- how do we deal with a world where such evil exists?  We deal with it by fighting it, and by taking heart in the fact that evil is over matched by the good in the world.  For proof of this latter point, I look to my family, to my friends, to the many blessings that we have. We will remember this day every year hence.  We may experience other days of grief and loss.  But we can and will take heart in knowing that good exists, that it will defeat evil, and that the world is a place worth saving because of it.  Thank God for that as well.

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