Wednesday, September 19, 2001
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Wednesday, September 19, 2001 |
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We will unite and become stronger I am writing this as I watch (for what seems like the thousandth time) the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapse before my very eyes, hoping that this time the pictures on the screen will seem more real and less like the high-tech action movies we've grown used to. Though part of my brain tells me this is not a film or a drill, the rest of me, for the moment, is not absorbing the reality. I am a citizen just like you. I work three jobs to support my single-parent household, and I get busy and complacent with life in America, just like you. I have taken for granted that our country will always be the biggest and the best, warts and all, and I, too, have let my guard down. This horrifying reminder that there are people out there who do not value life above hate and petty cause send me rushing to my faith and urges my temporarily short-circuited senses to find some sort of grasp on the enormity of the situation. Over the past couple of days I have watched, and thought, and prayed, and cried, and waited, and I've wondered if there might be more to follow, just like you. But no matter the pain, the confusion, the anger at the sheer audacity of this person or group responsible, I keep coming back to the same comforting thought: They will not break us. They would have us cringe, they would have us panic, they would have us commit holy war to bring us to their level. They want our hate and our anger and our vows of revenge so that we might sound and act and look like them. They have brought a section of our country down, and at some camera angles it is hard to tell if that is really our country or a war-torn, ravaged section of the Middle East, where they live with this destruction all the time and are used to it. I urge that we vow we will never get used to it. I urge that we vow we will not reduce our collective response to their level of hate and anger. I urge that we vow we will unite and become stronger than we've ever been before, even stronger than at the time of the world wars we have endured. When force is necessary, I urge that we vow it will be swift and sure and as humanitarian as possible, something they do not seem to know or care anything about. We will rebuild. We will continue to conduct business. We will heal. What this person or group has done will never be forgotten, will always be a jagged wound for those families whose lives have been torn apart by the death and destruction, and will forever be a historical marker in time. What this person or group has not done is cripple us forever. We limp, but we are not paralyzed, and we will get better. The remarkable thing is that out of many heinous events such as this emerges a stronger and more powerful force than before; a sharper, more streamlined, alert force that is forever changed but not forever doomed. This person or group would have to eliminate every single American and burn every inch of our country's soil and take a bulldozer to every piece of evidence of our lives before we would go down. And no person or group on God's Earth has that much power. Tere Goodwin Fayette
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