Too often now, when Sept. 11 comes around, it is only one more tiny square on the calendar with written words next to the printed number.
Even for many who witnessed the day’s events on television screens, memories have begun to fade.
Is this what happens as we become part of history, each person remembering with selective vision and then what actually happened becoming a blur?
A good friend answers my question. He says, and I think he may actually mean it, “The future is fixed; the past is ever changing.”
Everything in me screams “No” and I am certain that this day stands as proof of the exact opposite.
Of course, what we remember changes; what we tell our children reflects our personal attitudes; what is written in history books depends upon who writes the books; what spreads through the internet via Facebook, Google and Twitter all are determined by who creates the input.
aps, suppositions and rationalizations pervade.
However, we humans track our lives with details of time and place. On this anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001, facts speak. They cannot be altered.
On the eleventh day of September in the year 2001, 19 men carried out a plan to fly four jet planes into four targets within the United States of America.
At 8:46 A.M. American Airlines Flight #11, struck the north tower of the International Trade Center in NYC.
At 9:03 A.M. United Airlines Flight #175 struck the south tower.
At 9:37 A.M. American Airlines Flight # 77 struck the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.
At 11:05 A.M. United Airlines Flight # 93 crashed in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
As a direct result, 2,998 victims died (this count as of Spring 2009, but numbers will remain forever incomplete). They were civilian men and women going about the business of their lives on that sunny Tuesday morning. They were military personnel at the Pentagon. They were crew and passengers of four airplanes. They were first responders, fire and police. Most were Americans, but there were also 327 from other countries. A child of three died on Flight 77, and more than 3,051 other children lost parents.
The past may be ever-changing according to who is creating the parameters of input, but the impact of those planes left empty chairs at thousands of dinner tables. And the destruction of two towers left an empty space in the skyline of New York City. Video recordings show us people jumping from buildings and debris raining down from 110 stories above. The sun shone amid clear blue skies, and then a cloud rolled down Church Street, turning everything gray, even the iridescent stripes on firefighters’ coats.. That day’s happenings, now eleven years into the past, represent something important that cannot be written away.
19 men flew a suicide mission. They believed they were destroying an enemy.
99 men and women aboard Flight 93 overpowered an enemy at the cost of their lives.
The facts of that day speak. Listening and learning, we can determine: what is good and what is bad?
The answer to that question serves as a building block of the future. We in the present will define that future.
Today we unite for a brief moment, walking among benches and trees outside a rebuilt Pentagon and standing shoulder to shoulder in a green Pennsylvania meadow. Beneath a new tower that will rise a symbolic 1776 feet above New York City’s sidewalks, we pause, our fingertips lingering on letters etched into bronze. Looking upward, we visualize a yet-to-be-determined destiny. Holding onto the truth of Sept. 11, we shall build America’s tomorrow.
Harriet Freiberger has lived in northwestern Colorado’s Elk River valley since 1982.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an online-only column and has not been edited.
