9/11--20 Years On

 9/11.

To everyone, it used to be just a date on the calendar. For the past twenty years however, it means the day our world changed forever.

There have been many times in the last ten-plus where I would see videos on YouTube where I would replay the network news coverage on that day, just to remind myself what actually happened and to see for myself that there were no conspiracies that ran rampant in the months that followed what happened (there's a YouTube channel that goes into detail about those theories and why they're debunked. I highly recommend it). And over and over I find that ABC's coverage with the late Peter Jennings was probably the most informative, with Tom Brokaw and NBC (who I saw) a close second. 

As the years have gone by, I still cannot begin to imagine the sheer heartbreak of not only New Yorkers, but the entire nation. Just yesterday on Twitter, I saw a picture of a little boy with the burning WTC towers in the background, and you could see in his eyes something was wrong. Or the videos of the terrified onlookers first staring at what was happening, then running for their lives as the towers crumbled to the ground. Or especially this image, when then President Bush, at an elementary school in Sarasota at the time, found out about the second plane crash (shown above).

What happened in the immediate aftermath was remarkable. We came as one as a country. Republicans and Democrats actually got along. Patriotism was at an all-time high. The Yankees became somewhat likeable in the eyes of some baseball fans. America rallied. We weren't going to allow a podunk terrorist, Osama bin Laden, bring the greatest nation on Earth to her knees. 

And then months later, we went after him. Little did we know, or believe at the time in would almost take an entire decade before we finally caught and killed the bastard, and spend almost two decades (until just this past month) before we would finally end our involvement in Afghanistan.

It's easy and I guess convenient to armchair quarterback what has taken place over the last twenty years, or play revisionist history of said events, such as, what if 9/11 didn't happen? Or if President Clinton had taken out bin Laden? How different would our nation look? We will likely never know the answers to those questions, but there is something that is known:

We must never forget. 

CT