9/11

A TV news man just said that Americans seem less affected by 9/11 this year.

No, we are not. It’s still such a wound to our country, but I think we’re letting it become a day for private mourning, for the families of the people who died.

But I hope the families don’t ever think America has forgotten. I don’t know about you, but I’ve thought about them all day, imagined children waiting for a dad who will never come home; elderly parents burying children who should, in a sane world, bury them; wives crying at night when the kids are asleep; husbands trying to hold it together to do honor to lost wives; friends and relatives trying to fill the hole in their lives. It’s incomprehensible, their pain. But they are not forgotten by the rest of the country.

And you know what else I think about? The terrorists. I feel rage and fury and hatred, but I also feel … sadness. Because every one of those Americans who died on 9/11 was missed in a completely pure way, while the terrorists were missed by people who might have condoned what they were doing. I see pictures of young men — always the young — being hugged by proud Muslim mothers as they send these poor young men out to blow themselves up. And I wonder how you can be happy about that. How you can be proud. How you can think a dead martyr is better than a live son.

Wars are always fought by the young. You sure didn’t see any of the older upper-level terrorists flying in those planes. No, they send the young, the kids they can influence and froth up and talk into doing something so unnatural. But the sad thing is, the terrorists weren’t soldiers. They weren’t meeting equals in battle; they were massacring old men, women, and children–innocents, noncombatants. There is no honor in “fighting” the unarmed.

And I think it’s sad that no one talked these young, impressionable, easily led men out of it, that no one said, “No, you will not. I would rather have a live son (or brother, or husband, or friend) than a dead martyr.”