I wish I had a powerful, beautiful statement I could make in tribute to today. I wish I could say something that hasn't already been said probably hundreds of times today, or over the 18 years passed.
Truth be told, my 9/11 story isn't really special. I was seven, then, in first grade. We were set to have an open house that night. I remember someone walking in and speaking to our teacher, telling her what happened, that the open house was cancelled.
I remember being told about what happened. My seven-year-old brain didn't understand the gravity of what happened. Did I know what death was? Yes. Did I know lots of people could and did die? Yes. But it didn't hit me.
It took several years before the weight of that day gradually, finally hit me. The scope of the attacks. The proximity to my home (as I live in Central Pennsylvania). The sheer numbers of people dying senselessly, horrifically. The scale of destruction.
The very letters, symbols September 11, 2001, 9/11 and all their derivatives are cemented into our lexicon. The feelings associated with it range, from despair and horror at the destruction wrought, to stories of hope and bravery by New York's Police, Fire Department, Rescue Services and everyday people.
So what else do I have to say? What else can I contribute to the millions of responses and tributes made as we as Americans reference that day?
The only thing I can think of to say is that the attacks didn't end that day. Yes, people were killed that day. But it was only the beginning of a series of events that would propel the world into chaos for (as of now) almost 20 years later.
Followers of a hateful ideology, a perversion of one of the world's oldest religions, willingly gave up their lives to kill thousands of people. Do those types of people exist in our country? Absolutely. But they're smarter than that. They've worked their way into being elected to the most powerful offices in all the world, turning their populations against populations for no other reason than to spread their hate and force others to believe in it.
When Neo-Nazis and white supremacists can raise the American flag as their flag, with a government that promises to stand behind them, we are not the bastion of American freedom we claim to be. We've lost that right when the most powerful man in the country calls white supremacists very fine people. We refuse that right when a state legislature uses its absent members honoring the thousands killed eighteen years ago as a means to gain an advantage and win a vote.
We give up the right to call ourselves better than the people who committed the 9/11 attacks when our leaders seek to remove our basic freedoms with the goal of reducing us to what amounts to a feudalistic society. They do this purely out of spite, out of hate for those they see as different and undeserving of basic human rights.
The leaders that created this cancer on our Democracy didn't just appear. Granted, several had been around long before September 11, 2001. But they didn't see it as we do. They saw our collective pain - and saw how to weaponize it. Many of our grievances have merit. But our real pain and anger were manipulated by those who wanted to stay in power, to gain power and use that power to do the most terrible thing of all - they want to make us what we hate.
The definitions of what it means to be an American vary. You can love your country. You can love the Bible. Hell, you can love guns.
But what isn't American? We can't fight bigotry and intolerance when we elect leaders as bigoted and intolerant as those we fight. Does it sound American, when we fight nations who jail and execute ethnic groups, only to then go and do it ourselves? Does the fact we were the "good guys" once mean we're always the "good" guys, no matter what we do?
Yes, there is hate that's entrenched in our past. No, it will never die, no matter how hard we try to stomp it out.
How do we fight it, then, if it's unbeatable?
That's the thing: It is beatable, but only when we fight it.
We have to remember the principles that we believe in as Americans, that we stand to protect those who can't effectively do so themselves. That we can only stand as a bastion and defender of freedoms when we fight for and defend the freedoms of our own citizens.
If we can do that, the people who died eighteen years ago will not have died in vain. The freedoms they believed in will stand as boldly as the Statue of Liberty and the building that now stands where the WTC Towers stood eighteen years ago.
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