Today is a day of remembrance and a day to say “Thank you” to those who daily risk their lives for us. It is a day to ponder the guts and determination to save lives which drive fire and police men and women to risk – and sometimes lose – their lives so that others might live. It is a day to remember and thank our military men and women who have made our enemies reap what they have sown.
it is a day to be thankful of the courage which exists within the hearts of very average Americans, a strength of character that caused a small group to fight the first hand to hand battle of World War III in the skies over Pennsylvania.
Above all, it is a day to remember a horror perpetrated against us and to renew our vows to make our enemies pay and pay again for what they did.
There will be much media hype and spin today. Officials will say those sort of things which officials always must say. Personally I prefer the simple direct emotions of people much like myself who needed an outlet to express what they felt: Why We Fight and Have You Forgotten.
If you have not listened to these before (or have but not lately) I recommend you sit back and do so when you have a private moment and are free to shed a tear in remembrance.
Amen.
Thanks for these words!
Amen brother. I will never forget that day, nor my dead colleagues, nor the hot anger that I felt about the people and the ideology behind this terrible deed.
Every time I see a movie or a photo of NY with the old magnificent Twin Towers, there is a lump in my throat and a sense of bitterness that does not go away, even as time goes by.
Amen. And thank you for your words and for reminding us!
While we’re remembering (as I sit here watching on MSNBC a real-time replay of that awful morning) —
I’ve never forgotten how the band at Buckingham Palace played “The Star Spangled Banner” during the changing of the guard.
I can’t tell you how that touched me. I wept. Again.
Those were hard days, and that was really important.
Tick, tock.
Five years on and my anger has increased at what these savages did to us on 9/11, and what they continue to do around the world.
My message to them – enjoy your 15 minutes of fame, freaks. Get your cheap kicks out of your IED’s, suicide car bombs, snuff movies and murderous ranting. While you can.
Time is running out for you, freaks. Tick tock.
You’ll notice that the majority of us have stayed quiet in the face of your daily threats, insults and killing. You have mistaken that for weakness. But we’re the children and grandchildren of the people who brought down the Nazis; the Japanese; the Communists. We know how to fight wars and when to start fighting them. So we stay quiet now, biding our time.
You chose your end and we plan to deliver it. Tick, tock.
We haven’t even started fighting yet. You don’t understand that. The last 5 years have been a warm up, a period for us to get ready to deliver our cold, bitter revenge.
You will pay dearly for what you did to us. Your cities will fall to rubble. Your homelands will be wasted. Your children and grandchildren will go to their hard beds, cursing you, Bin Laden and that you ever existed. Jihadi coward – the day will come when you blink into the sun and realise, with dread , that Allah is not coming to help you and that your enemies are coming, with fury, to hunt you down.
Don’t intend ever to forget, it happens to be my birthday; came down on the day, to be greeted by burning towers on Fox News channel.
Later, singed papers and the like, landed in my garden here in Brooklyn, it was, and is, so very real for all time.
Some very brave people died that day.
Nuff said.
Uhm, is it me, or is Enola kinda real scary? The very nick itself sends chills up my spine. I hope the commenter’s not advocating the use of nukes so early in the game.
And Osama reads the words of “Enola Gay” and he quakes, not with fear, but with laughter.
If Osama wore t-shirts with clever sayings, his would certainly read:
I destroyed the World Trade Center, killed 3000 people, and all I got was AWAY WITH IT!
Of course I am not advocating the use of nukes. I am just expressing my anger at what happened on that day. Perhaps I was not ‘nuanced’ enough for the more intelligent members on the board.
Shhh… Everyone. This is a remembrance, not a political debate. All of those are in the ‘other rooms’.
A good post by Dale Amon.
I have watched many of the events today (thanks to Fox).
The President and everyone else did well, but sticks in mind was Lady Thatcher – old and hit by several strokes, but still straight backed as she walked with the Vice President.
Word blindness strikes again – but what sticks in my mind, not “what sticks in mind”.
I’ve heard many Muslims say that they were changed by 9:11 – that is, they sought a deeper Islamic identity, as if in some tacit way they were proud of the massacre, that it gave them some kind of potency.
Well, it changed me too. I realised the breadth of what we now have to defend, and how much better it is than the repellent, philistine, regressive crap that is plugged by the Islamists, not to mention the vacillating, effete hordes of apologetic left-wingers that support them. Yes, I stopped buying the Guardian (“America got a bloody nose”: remember?) and it was as if a dark cloud had lifted.
There’s an interview w/the wife of 1 the heros on Flight 93 in a Catholic paper. I think it was Burnett.
About 1 year before, he felt the overwhelming urge to go to Mass every day, God was telling him he had something important to do, and if I remember correctly, dreamt that it would involve the White House and affect a lot of people.
I think Enola Gay has a point, although perhaps not the one intended. The MSM programs have been all about sad music and remembrances, as though it had been a hurricane or an earthquake rather than an atrocity. There are plenty of Americans who are still furious, and I doubt we have seen the end of it.
Enola Gay really does have a point. You have to get nasty to win a war. his/her screen name is not an issue for me. The B-29s Enola Gay and Bock’s Car ended the most murderous conflict in history.
There is a very good discussion going on over at Chicagoboyz in regard to the attacks, but from a different perspective, based on a post by den Beste.
As to Dale’s very nice post, it is easy to forget the real demands of being a first responder or a line soldier when confronting the minor hassles of traffic rules or some gaffe on one or the others’ part. The “dumb beat cop” or the caricature of the crazed “killing machine” so beloved by movie makers and “peace” types is easy to scoff at, ridicule, disdain, from our perches high above, and removed, from the fray.
Get down in the dirt, and out on the streets, with these brave souls, though, and some of this naive condescention starts to fade.
There’s an old saying about watching which way people run when they hear shots, or see flames. Most people run away, as is to be expected, but some few run toward the sound of the guns, brave the flames to look for trapped survivors, find it within themselves to push away their fear and natural instincts and do their duty.
This is a pearl beyond price. It should be recognized for its rare value, and beauty.
I wept on September 11th 2001. I wept again this morning.
I’ve only been to NYC once. It was December ’96 and, as a Christmas present, I had the chance to fly to any city in the US. I thought of a few but it was always gonna be NYC. It had to be New York. I was spending Christmas in Atlanta and doing a road trip around the South-East. I toyed with Vegas and Frisco but it was NYC in the end. It was in the beginning if I’m honest.
We (my Atlantan now ex and I) stayed most of the time in her cousin’s apartment three blocks south of the Empire State Building. We had a brilliant time. We did all the usual stuff. We went to the Met. We were serenaded by an appalling Sinatra-wannabe over dinner in little Italy. We went to the Gugenheim in the evening (they were playing excellent jazz in the atrium). My girlfriend’s cousin had a party (pre-scheduled – what luck!) one night and we sat on the top of his apartment block while the heat-exchangers gushed and drank Jack Daniels, got stoned and looked up at the the Twin Towers.
Most of that time I was in a strange city with someone who knew it scarcely better than me. The aircraft warning pylon on one of the World Trade Center towers was our compass.
One morning we went up the Empire State Building and I looked over New York. We were pretty much the first up and mist still clung lower down but the sun was bright and slanting. I fell in love with the Chrysler Building but, to the south, rising from the mist was the awesome sight of those towers catching the light.
My last night in New York was spent at the flat of one of my girlfriend’s college friends in Hoboken. We went to a bar and looked over New York that night. It was awesome.
I don’t think people who lived there had got used to it either.
I mourn for nearly 3000 dead. I also mourn for the destruction of something awe-inspiring. Just looking at (and it was hard to miss) for just under a week gave me feelings of power and confidence. If we as a species can build that then what else can we achieve?
That is why I wept on 11/9/01. I wept about the destruction of something awesome and wonderful. I wept because that skyline will never be the same and it was beautiful.
I wept because atavistic nihilism had destroyed what it could not build. And I wept because the tools used were Boeing 767s designed to bring people together – just like the one that had brought me to the USA in the first place.
One day we will get them back. I’m English but as far as I’m cconcerned it is “we”.