I remember that the perpetrators were a group of people who perversely thought striking buildings and stealing thousands of lives was the way to get a point across.
I can't help but also think of the division, the hatred and the callous hearts that also come with remembering this day.
We've trapped ourselves with unforgiveness - the deadliest of human emotion. All that negative energy we have pent up inside that cannot be transferred to the perverse people that are responsible for 9/11 and would do it again, we transfer it to each other. We transfer it to our government and those who share the same religion but not the same moral standards of terrorists.
In our pursuit of justice, we have found selfishness and a pride that is wholly un-American (the cynic in me says history proves it's quite American). Now, when we boast in our freedoms and civil liberties, we condemn the freedoms and civil liberties of our neighbors, our coworkers and those we don't even know.
When I think of 9/11, I think about being in a cafeteria of nervous middle school students waiting for buses to arrive. We were granted early dismissal just in case we'd be attacked due to our proximity to D.C. I think about the pool of faces; some belonging to people that I honestly didn't like but seeing the tears on their faces and the concern behind it, I couldn't look at them and say "you deserve it". That's what we're doing to each other 9 years later. We're saying that we didn't deserve this type of action, embarrassment and emotion and I don't think we did. So we deflect. We try to punish those who suffered and cried with us. We're telling them that they deserve it merely for having a type of skin color, dress and belief that extremists have corrupted. We try to punish each other for acknowledging the memory of 9/11 in different ways. Some acknowledge it by supporting war, some by peace and some by protest but all of us were right in the ways we did so.
We ask God to bless America, but not the America that is in any way, shape or form related to the evildoers of 9/11. We ask America to bless God, but for Him not to hear the cries of those we've outcast and are indifferent to. We try to make this a matter for God; yet we set a battle against the flesh and blood of our neighbors when He has called us to not only love one another but to test all spirits of the matter.
I don't think we're testing spirits and motives now and deciding if they mean us harm. I think we're jumping at anything that makes us feel like we either "deserved" 9/11 or makes us remember the emotions that came with it. Worst of all, we politicize it. On the day where thousands died we politicize it.
We owe it to those who lost their lives to grieve with those they left behind while seeking to understand and love those we've outcast.
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