Remembering..

It is seared in my memory. The morning of September 11^th, 2001.

I had a call to my office at Frontier Community College where the person mentioned a plane had collided with a New York skyscraper. The events that unfolded from there left me worried about my three young sons and the safety of our entire nation.

2996. That’s how many died as I watched in the student lounge with a mob of FCC students on the college’s only television. We arrived, never talked over the news anchors, and audibly moaned as the second plane hit the World Trade Center’s South Tower. At that moment, we all realized this was an enemy attack.

As the day concluded, I knew the country had changed. We were united. We could agree on the need for retaliation and the desperate need to better protect the homeland against a real threat to our way of life.  

But things have changed in the last 18 years.

There are some who actively diminish the memory of 9-11. They are foolish and disrespectful of the deaths of the lives taken in an instant…and all of those who have died since protecting us from the enemy. And there is an enemy—which has splintered and grown into dozens of groups around the world.

There is a terrorist born every minute in the Middle East who will be educated and trained to hate the United States.

More disturbing to me is there is a faction…within our country….doing the same thing.