When I remember 9.11, I?

I hope this blog finds you doing well. It leaves my fingers doing well.

I wasn't going to write about 9.11 today. I wasn't going to do it. I had thought that if I would write a blog it would only say “When I remember 9.11, I cry.”

What more is there to add?

Then on the way to church, the flag wavers were on the overpass and church had an interview with a local fire chief that had friends in the twin towers. The chief is a man who on the gayest of days has a face that expresses that the cares of the world are pondered and carried behind his eyes.

It was very moving. Yet, the thing that changed my mind was my high school Sunday school class. I think that I have mentioned that I love this group of kids. If I haven't, I love this group of kids. Week in and week out they come together and wrestle with whatever tough questions they come up with. They disagree with one another in a loving manner and accept that any opinions expressed there are not stupid and are important enough to be shared.

We started the day with "even though you were in kindergarten or 1st or 2nd grade, what do you remember about 9.11, and how did it affect you?"

As you can imagine there was a lot of head nodding as the kids shared that they really didn't know what it meant. They knew something important had happened. A common refrain was that their parents just stared at the TV when they got home from school. They knew something big had happened, but no one had words to express it.

Then suddenly someone piped up and asked me what I remembered; "you were an adult then." Yes, yes, I was. I was well into adulthood at the time. Bev and I had a couple of sobering moments this weekend where our maturity was on full display. This was one more. Who knows it may make a blog in the future? Of course, we will be older by that time.

Yes, I remember 9.11 very well. We were still farming and that Tuesday was chicken killing day. I guess it wasn't a good day to be a chicken either. We had just started and I had heard that the plane had hit. After running to the house and turning on the TV, I realized that I wasn't watching a replay of the event but was watching the second plane crash in real time. In shock, I went out to the barn to continue the work of the day and listened as the Pentagon was hit, a plane crashed in Pennsylvania, the towers fell with a large loss of life, the President was being sent to an undisclosed location, and all air traffic was grounded. 

I remember the kids getting home and after finding out that they had watched the coverage most of the day, I took them out to the yard that overlooks the valley that is our farm and told them that it was going to be okay. That things had changed in a great many ways. The United States had been attacked, but it is a big country. I doubt that Ingalls was going to be a target. Bev and I would do everything we could to keep them safe.

Looking back, I think that was an error. Well meaning but I was wrong. Safety in this world is an illusion. We would do all that we could to keep them safe but there would come a day when our kids would go out with friends, take Grey Hound trips across the country, go to college, jump out of perfectly good planes, and go to Ghana to fight human trafficking. Safety is an illusion. It is an illusion that we hold onto tightly. It is an illusion that we will spend the national treasury in order to have. With the illusion firmly in our grasp, we can go on and make other plans, think great thoughts, pursue true love, live our lives. I get all of that.

The other thing besides the national treasury that we have given up is our freedom. Since 9.11, I have been frisked walking into an NFL game, had my privates displayed on a screen so that a TSA agent could check out my "package", had my phone calls and library loans monitored. I think that is too much. You may disagree. I don't blame you.

One of the kids disagreed this morning. She feels comforted knowing all of the steps that have been taken. She feels safer when there are snipers on buildings around big events. The frisking that I received was not overly intrusive. If those steps were to be stopped, she is sure that we will be attacked. I cannot disagree with her. We may well be. In fact, I will agree that there will be more attacks.

But it strikes me that now the government has created 300 million enemies. Each of us is an enemy until we have been cleared and placed in a controlled environment. I admire those dedicated law enforcement professionals committed to our safety. Still I pause when I think that during my lifetime I will be in the crosshairs waiting for a decision to be made about my lethality.

But what about the more attacks? It strikes my that most of the publicized foiled attempts have been foiled by street vendors telling the cops that that guy looks suspicious, or by airline passengers pouring water down the terrorist's underwear. Why don't we trust our citizenry? We have a stake in the war. We believed that the citizenship grade was important in elementary, and we believed that it would go on our permanent record. We are not the enemy. We can be trusted.

And what about when we are attacked again?

We will know who the enemy is, and he is not us.

Take care.

Roger