You remember that day. It’s a recollection that retains excruciating clarity 14 years later – the sunny Tuesday morning when, we would later say, everything changed.
Nobody saw them coming, those doomed planes. We didn’t, couldn’t possibly anticipate that an iconic skyline epitomizing the land of the free would be forever changed sometime between breakfast and lunch. We could never fathom watching helplessly as extremists’ meticulously executed plan hurled thousands of innocents into a mangled abyss of concrete and steel.
I’m not sure how it felt to you, but when I stepped in front of the TV that morning and saw that somebody had crashed a plane into one of the World Trade Center towers, it seemed so surreal. Surely there had been some sort of medical event that could explain a commercial aircraft going so horribly off-course. It wouldn’t, couldn’t possibly be a thing that had been done with intent. That would just be too awful to grasp.
Like a lot of us, as the other tower was hit, I went from dumbfounded and disbelieving to horrified and heartbroken. The enormity of what had just been done to us felt unbearable. We watched, desperately wishing it was just an unimaginably bad dream, as the towers tumbled.
And in the days that followed, we all grappled with it. We processed the sequence of incomprehensible acts that led to so much blood spilled on our own home soil. There was no sense to be made of it.
So we hunkered down. We hugged our loved ones and hung our flags. We gave blood, lots of it.
And people here did what they could to start the healing. Naperville firefighters went to the scene of the carnage, part of a massive fleet of freshly anointed heroes who gave vast new and well-earned respect to the term “first responder.” Charities in town earmarked portions of their proceeds from fundraising events for the American Red Cross. The city rallied around Don and Pat Shanower, whose son, Cmdr. Dan Shanower, lost his life when the third plane hit his workplace in the Pentagon on that awful day. A splendid memorial went up on the Riverwalk to honor his sacrifice. And members of the faith community toiled to share their understanding that what happened on that sunny morning did not bear the true banner of Islam.
The unspeakable terror of that day gave rise to some things within us that we’d not stirred in a good long while, among them unbeknownst caches of courage and compassion and caring. They left us devastated and deeply saddened, certainly, but also endowed anew with a sense of our common humanity, in all of its precious fragility and astoundingly beautiful might. We learned, awed, about the remarkable power of the human spirit.
We took some of that and used it for the powers of good. We began treating one another a little more kindly. Patriotism once again was the way to go.
Sadly, as time passed, we forgot some of that. Politics regained its footing and polarization ensued. Fingers were pointed, battle lines drawn. It became us and them, right here on our own home soil. And today we remain more divided on a wide array of issues than we ever have been before.
I’d like to suggest we bear in mind that we still have it in us to converse, to share ideas, to reason with one another. To acknowledge that evil preys on discord, considers it an ally. To realize that give and take are both healthy things, that compromise isn’t failure and middle ground is worth seeking out – and that there’s peace to be found there. Because we can do better.
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