9/11 Post Script

This is a postscript to yesterday’s posting “911 a Remembrance and a Sharing”.

Yesterday was 9/11/2008 and I had hoped that there would have been an assembly in our school to remember the tragedy and honor the victims and heroes on that day. Instead, we had what has turned out to be the standard and obligatory “Moment of Silence” at 9:00 am. I am frustrated and angered that seven years have passed and no politician has proposed a National Day of Remembrance. Although I know that we will never forget, we need to honor those 2,948 innocents who died that day. We must honor and acknowledge the heroes… Not only the NYC firefighters, police officers and EMT’s who valiantly gave their lives to save their fellow New Yorkers, but those in Washington DC at the Pentagon and those amazing, courageous, civilians on Flight 93, who sacrificed their lives to stop the fourth attack on our soil, by crashing their plane into a Pennsylvanian field.
For the past two years, I have been teaching US History, so it seemed appropriate that in our US History classes, we would do a memorial to 9/11/2001 on September 11, 2008. I was impressed and quite proud of my students, most of whom were 8 or 9 years old on that day, seven years ago. I shared my experience and those students, who were willing to, shared theirs. I then showed a PowerPoint presentation to the class, who were quiet and respectful. If the government will not designate yesterday as a day of remembrance, I sure will.

During the Christmas holiday 2001, my wife and I went into New York City to see a Broadway play, which has been our holiday tradition since I became a teacher. We refused to allow terrorists to take that tradition from us. I was aware of the fear of terrorist attack in the eyes of the people around me and within my own heart when I saw military personnel in combat uniforms, carrying M-16 rifles in the streets of NYC. We walked through the streets that we both knew so well; being Brooklynites, walking through NYC was a normal experience. However, that evening was different. As we walked by a firehouse, the lights and sirens went on and the large red garage door opened. As the fire truck started to inch its way out of the firehouse, everyone standing, waiting began to applaud the firefighters; our heroes. New Yorkers, who are noted for their impatience, aloofness and abruptness, embraced their heroes and here we were, showering these firefighters in the appreciation they so rightly deserved, an appreciation that was non-existent before 9/11. The memory of being a part of a group of strangers cheering for those firefighters in Manhattan has stayed with me for these past seven years. But then, the feeling faded. The heroes are still there but we went back to our own lives. The cheers stopped… The applause quieted down, like the clapping at the end of the last act of a Broadway play, just faded away. We just stopped noticing and acknowledging them.

Although I am new to bloging, I will attempt to attach some PowerPoint presentations of the attack and the aftermath on this posting, not for those of us who have become more or less hardened to their subject matter. Becoming “hardened” may not be the right description, but I feel, in order to keep from crying continuously, we need to become a little… hardened. The PP presentations I will be attaching are for those children who, like my two beautiful granddaughters, were born after 9/11/2001, whose life, through no fault of their own will be described as the “Post 9/11” generation. The beauty of the web and blogs is that these PP presentations will be around (hopefully) long after we are all gone. So that future post 9/11 generations will have accurate sights and sounds of the attack that changed the world, in order to always remember. And hopefully the old adage will come true… “Those of us who forget history are doomed to repeat it.”
The PP presentation that I plan to paste onto this blog may just soften you and if you are by yourself with no one around, and you feel a tear or two well up… let them flow… it’s OK to cry.