Remembering 9/11

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In 1986 my college professor in a political science class predicted Islamic terrorism would come to the shores of America.  At the time, in spite of the evidence he provided, I couldn’t believe it.  I didn’t want to believe it. 

Five years after 9/11 I fear that’s where we are as a country and it scares me more than the fear I felt on 9/11.

In 1993 I was working in downtown Manhattan when the bomb went off at the WTC.  I’ve followed the investigations and reporting ever since.  At that time I had a horrible, deep in the pit of my stomach feeling that the attack wouldn’t be the last attack.

Just before I moved from NYC to DC I sat in a darkened conference room of 1 Battery Park Plaza staring at the towers.  I told my spiritual director that it seemed to me that they were reaching up to God.  

On 9/11 I was driving to work when I heard of the first plane crashing into tower I.  I knew right away what it was.  In reports after 1993 the NY media reported how the F.B.I. agents would taunt the terrorists as they took them to City Hall for trial by pointing to the towers and say, “They’re still standing” and the terrorists would grin and say that they wouldn’t be for long.  I remembered that on 9/11.  Once I got into our building the second plane had just hit tower II.  There was a big media room in the law firm I worked for where everyone had assembled.  When I walked in and saw the towers burning I burst into tears.  Especially when they reported that people were jumping.

The day is best told in the phone call of Melissa Doi.  The tape picks up as she is praying the Hail Mary.  When it was released I listened to it and it has stayed with me ever since.  The immense horror she must have felt as the smoke and heat overwhelmed her and she died.  She makes sure the operator knows to call her mother with her last words.  She prays as she dies.

Peggy Noonan put it best.  The people who perished that day knew what was important and it is apparent from their last messages or phone calls to their loved ones.  Melissa Doi certainly did.

I pray that we never forget who our enemy is and that we, as a country, never lose our nerve and fight this enemy until it is defeated no matter how long it takes.  This has been going on for 23 years and each unanswered attack has only strengthened our enemy against us.

How do we negotiate with an enemy whose only goal is to kill us?  This is what I don’t understand about those who don’t support the war against terrorism.  Michelle Malkin points to a blog post of Bryan Preston who describes this better than I ever could.  In part:

Five years on, a psychosis has gripped millions who can’t and won’t fathom the true nature of the war we are in. For many of them, having been born and raised in an essentially post-Christian West, they can’t imagine that anyone might be motivated to kill and die because of something a warlord wrote down centuries ago. They cannot imagine any religion other than the one they believe they have outgrown being violent or causing violence. They cannot imagine anyone fighting for a cause that offers no material gains and therefore cannot be negotiated away. In our essentially materialist West, millions lack the imagination to believe that bin Laden’s pining for the return of Andalusia to Muslim rule is in his mind a legitimate reason to wage war on America now. They can imagine their own countrymen being so motivated, though, and I think that’s key to understanding their state of mind. They can imagine the Rotary Club member down the street plotting mayhem because he goes to church and votes Republican, but they can’t imagine that the Muslim in Karachi is a real, live enemy who is actually plotting an attack.

But that’s where we are.  The most important struggle of our lives has turned totally political and who we are fighting and what they want to do to us is lost in the arguing.

They want us all to die like Melissa Doi.

CSG

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