9/11- My Feelings 8 Years Later

An article by Brad    No Comments

I wasn’t in New York during the 9/11 terrorist attacks.  But I was close, across the river in Newark.  You could see the Twin Towers when you stepped out the doors to the dental school.

I remember seeing the Towers that morning, as I saw them every morning.  I remember watching the aftermath of the attacks on the television in the student lounge. 

I remember going outside several minutes later and looking at the smoking Towers

I remember going outside several hours and NOT seeing the Towers where they should have been along the skyline.

I remember all of the juniors and seniors gathering inside the lounge at the end of the day, the Dean of the dental school asking for volunteers to stay later to help out in case they needed extra hands at the emergency room.

I remember sitting around for hours twiddling my thumbs and watching  the news.  We weren’t needed.  Bceause there weren’t many survivors.

You know, the liberal media today things its okay to publish the photos and dead and dying soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq to remind us all of the horrors of war.  Yet during the year, you never see pictures of the smoking Towers.  Or of the terrorists responsible for the disaster.  Its okay to forget those things, but for some reason we must be reminded graphically of the horrors of war.

I remember the sentiment after 9/11, the bloodlust, the anger, the raw emotion.  Its gone now, as the citizens who live in the Northeast and California seemed to have forgotten what was done to us.  Out of sight, out of mind.  Time heals all wounds.  Shit like that.  And we, as a country, seem to have moved past it.

We should never move past this.  Never.  You want to remind us of the horrors of war?  How about we re-publish the photos of the smoking Towers and the photos of the monsters who were responsible every day.  How about we remind the people of this country who have forgotten, who have slipped into the arms of complacency.  People don;t seem to care anymore, and instead of condemning the type of people who committed this act, we coddle them.  Instead of standing firm against the ideology of the religion that committed these acts, we reach out and try to embrace them.

Instead of putting our foot down on the necks of these people, we ask them meekly to change, and to accept us.  its sad, and its pathetic.

You know, I felt a hundred times safer under the watch of Bush and Cheney.  I don’t feel safe now.  I don’t want to be friends with the Muslim world.  I don’t want to be closer with a culture that breeds these monsters.  I want them to hate us.  I want them to feel that we are at ideological odds with them.  Because the moment that the Muslim world comes to accept us, it means we have changed.

And that means we have lost.

We shouldn’t look at pictures of dead soldiers to be reminded of the price of war.  We should be looking at pictures like this to remind us of why going to war was necessary.