Remembering

I was 14 the first time I felt that feeling of utter shock and disintegration. I was in gym class laying on my stomach on a mat while the teacher explained the finer points of gymnastics. Suddenly a voice came over the PA system instructing all teachers to end their classes and to hurriedly send their students to homerooms.

Upon entering the homeroom we were then told that President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. The following days were a blur with everyone glued to their TV sets. This had never happened in my lifetime. I would come to feel that it was a moment that would shape America in so many ways, many of them unforeseen.

Five years later this act would be repeated times two with the deaths of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. All I could think was that the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave was not the place I was born into, nor would it ever be the same again.

I witnessed the inner deterioration of what used to be a country a person could depend on. I saw how lies replaced the values which it was founded on. I knew then that we would never recover from the death of our innocence nor would we ever move in the direction of health for this once-great land. Nothing has intervened to change my mind.

National shock would happen once again in 1986 and 2003 as the Challenger and Columbia shuttle disasters occurred. Being deemed as accidents didn't take away the heartfelt pain that all Americans felt as a result.

But in no way was anyone prepared for the acts of September 11, 2001. Such brutality and lack of respect for life had never befallen us before. We had never known such disfavor in God's eyes. We were stunned.

Here it is eight years later. I wonder if people are still appalled and broken? New York City has recovered in many ways. The will to survive and move on vaulted the city into action and the world was watching. And yet the issues facing America and its security coupled with all its internal management problems has forced the shock and terror of that one day into the background.

I, for one, choose to remember. I knew not one soul that perished that day, not one. But I will never forget how I felt and still feel about it. It is that same sick feeling I fell on the day I was 14 and heard of Kennedy. It was just another day of knowing that my life would never again be the same. Please take a moment today to remember those who vanished September 11, 2001. It could have happened anywhere. The fact is, it happened here, USA, Planet Earth. Let us never forget.