Five Years Today

It was a September morning made more perfect in our memories by the way it was shattered so completely. I was working from home that day. It could have been a news alert on my computer - or maybe a breaking news item on the radio, I can't recall. But I heard about it suddenly, and in time to snap on the television to watch what I expected to be the simple calamity of a plane that had accidentally crashed into the World Trade Center.

Then I watched the impact of the second plane.

The house in which I grew up was full of literature and history - my mother's loves. From the picture of Daniel Webster on the wall to the seemingly endless collection of World War II and Civil War books to the long list of periodicals to which we subscribed - from the Smithsonian to the New Republic to the National Review and back around. It was impossible, in my family, to grow up without a cardinal idea of our location in history. The walls and bookshelves seemed to say, "All of this came before you, these events and people." And the coffee table, groaning with the weight of current magazines and newspapers, spoke of our contemporary role.

Matt Lauer began speaking again after a few quiet seconds. The puff of debris from a second impact said everything was different. Two planes don't crash like that by accident - instead we were watching Pearl Harbor unfold in realtime. History would come crashing down on us as surely as the towers did over the course of the next couple of hours.

For a long time I couldn't reflect on the events of that day without getting very upset. When my daughter was nine years old, two years ago, she asked me to explain 9/11, and I couldn't. The memory was too raw. Even a few days ago I was at the gym, walking on a treadmill, half- watching a news broadcast and following the closed captioning. A segment featured the children who have grown up without a mother or father – whose parents who perished in the towers, the Pentagon, the planes, or the rescue effort. The history, events of that day came crashing back as I watched those sweet, innocent kids.

Do we owe it to those kids to forget about 9/11 and simply pray that it will never happen again? What does history teach us when we step back and consider where things stand? Can you imagine some people now claim it didn’t even happen at all? Our capacity for denial seems limitless, which is one of the reasons why I’m in the camp of people who are still concerned about our security.

And I’ll never forget that day.

Tags: 9/11