Eight Years Ago

I always get up early. It's a curse of mine since childhood. The good thing is I get to enjoy a nice cup of coffee and savor the early morning hours as the sun rises.

It was just such a moment 8 years ago as I was vacationing with friends in Michigan. I had joined a few folks who were also early risers and had just taken my first sip pf coffee when I overheard one of the busboys mention that they saw on the news that a plane had hit the World Trade Center.

I got up and walked to the resort's bar where the TV was tuned to the news. I got there just in time to see the second plane hit the towers. This was no accident and from that moment on it seemed that the whole world changed.

I know now that the world didn't change, only my perception of it did. Instead of living in my insular mundane life, I realized I was part of a tumultuous planet where numerous factions driven by a variety of grievances are constantly battling each other.

Though my country had often participated in these wars overseas, the action had not touched our shore in such a dramatic way as this. Now we were engaged in the world community fully, we were victims of the same kinds of attacks that were being carried out everywhere, except now we understood we could not separate ourselves from it.

We had domestic terrorists like McVay but they didn't seem as dangerous as the 9/11 perpetrators, even though they accomplished the same things. Sometimes it takes something dramatic to wake us up.

Since that tragic day we have added our own share to the blood shed for radical causes. We invaded a country that was not connected to the 9/11 plot simply because our leaders decided it was a good strategic move. They were wrong and so were the 9/11 hijackers. Their actions killed thousands of people who wanted nothing more than to get on with their daily lives.

I would never excuse the terrible actions of those madmen. Their hatred and passions drove them to do hideous things. In the long run their acts did not have the intended results. In the case of the 9/11 hijackers, they did not bring down our financial institutions, we had greedy investment bankers to do that. Our invasion of Iraq did not bring the blessings of democracy to the Middle East, the people in those countries will do that all by themselves and probably in a way that we might not like. Meanwhile, that invasion acted as a recruiting tool for Al Qaeda much like the attack on New York and the Pentagon acted as a recruitment tool for the armed forces.

Unintended consequences.

Now it's time to remember those people who died as a result. They were not heroes, just folks like you and me who suddenly found themselves on the world stage in their final moments. May their memories serve to end radical acts that cause such terrors and someday serve to remind us just how important each life is. I hope 9/11 will always be a wake up call, I just hope I don't need any more like it.