It’s hard to believe Friday will be 25 years since the world changed so much in just a few hours.
Miss Rhonda had worked late at the radio station the night before 9/11, so I was letting her sleep in. I was in the kitchen, listening to a TV broadcast over the radio. I had already made my calls that morning, checking with law enforcement; and there were a few reports to gather. I was anxiously eagerly awaiting the phone call that would make a big, positive difference for our family: I was to be told that day when to report to my new, full-time job. I couldn’t have worked there just a few months before, since I was helping care for my father. Ironically, it was Papa’s birthday, and Miss Lois wanted me to take her to the cemetery that afternoon.
When the first plane hit, I went to bedroom and gently awakened my wife.
She was getting a cup of coffee when the second airliner crashed into the World Trade Center.
So much was taken from all of us that day; much more was taken from the 2,977 families whose lives were unutterably changed when planes hit the towers, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania. The deaths didn’t stop there, of course. There were firefighters, EMS, law enforcement and civilians who gave their lives trying to save others. Some died quickly, while some lingered in a slow death, sickened by the toxic stew created by the suicidal tendencies of those who practice a religion of hate. Then there were still others who later gave their lives on battlefields in places the average American couldn’t find on a map.
A quarter-century has passed, and what has changed?
Despite less than competent leadership and even opposition in Washington, our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines actually made a difference in the homes of those who planned the attacks. Something resembling a stable government was formed in Afghanistan. People trusted and respected America again, and bad guys were dying in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Then we had eight years of a new president who threw much of that away.
We got a president who apologized to the nations who attacked us, a president who sent pallets of cash to our enemies in hopes that they pretty please wouldn’t do bad things. When he left office, and we had a strong president who didn’t play, the politicians did everything possible to ensure America’s failure against those who hate us, in part because they feared what might happen with a resurgent American people.
In the end the politicians won.
The politicians and bureaucratic generals then gave away the victory, or at least the honorable turnover of power, all so a sad, confused old man could mock his predecessor. His administration allowed Americans to be killed and equipped terrorists all for being able to say “I told you so.”
But then America stood back up and brought back the strong man who was so hated by the left; hated in part because he was feared by our enemies, but respected by the group that most frightens career bureaucrats and politicians – the majority of Americans. It was too late for those whose lives were cast aside, but it wasn’t too late for America.
A quarter-century after that beautiful September morning when everything turned ugly, many Americans have lost patience with the apologists and supporters of terrorism, and most importantly, they are not afraid to say so.
It still might be too late, considering how 12 years of two Anti-American presidents allowed millions of folks to enter the country with few restrictions, enough so that there are candidates who now openly say America deserved 9/11. New York now has a Muslim mayor who insults both America and Israel, as well as those who died on 9/11. He insists that he will attend Friday’s memorial service, although hundreds of survivors and victims’ families have told him he isn’t welcome. Just this week he downplayed the role of the terrorists, blaming the smoke and chemicals from the plane crashes for sickening people, more than blaming the terrorists who caused those crashes in the first case.
We have openly anti-Semitic political hopefuls who espouse some bizarre form of socialist Islam that they apparently think will work better than socialism has any time before – without realizing they are being played. Like a lot of so-called Christians who cherrypick the Bible, some of these useful idiots on the left are cherrypicking the Qu’ran, conveniently ignoring the parts of the false prophet’s teachings that they don’t like. Perhaps cherrypicking isn’t the right term; it’s more like they’re picking green persimmons, and will blame someone else when their mouths swell up.
I hope and pray Americans are smart enough to see through the hysteria – some of which is fed by both the left and the right, I might add – and send the useful idiots home next election, but that’s a column for another day.
I was out in the storage building one day, searching for one of those particular tools that you only need every ten years or so, when I spotted what I thought was an odd piece of pipe.
It turned out to be the barrel of a single-shot 12 gauge. I fished out the other parts, sadly bearing the signs of years of neglect after a perfunctory scrubbing when our home flooded in 2016. That shotgun has downed many a dove, quite a few quail, other small game, beaver, coyote and deer. It was what I held as I stood on the porch of our home in Wilmington when a street party was turning into a riot in 1993.
On Sept. 11, 2001, I dropped a round of buckshot in the chamber and didn’t leave home without it for a few weeks.
I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it, but times were scary. My wife was scared; my mama was scared, and dodgastit, she had already been through enough that year. In the unlikely event evil came to our town, my family would be protected.
I remembered my hunting and life mentor, Mr. Woody telling how his father could barely walk in 1941, but in the hours and days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, he sat on the porch with an impossibly long Fox double barrel, the hammers at half-cock. Had a Nazi soldier or Japanese Zero somehow appeared in our little milltown, I guarantee you that there would have been at least two empty, smoking high brass Remington-Peters shells on the front porch.
We need Americans like that again, 25 years after the war was brought to our soil and the politicians slowly began surrendering to the enemy.
Sure enough, when I put the pieces of my old Stevens together, the old girl clicked up and functioned just fine. I’m in the process of restoring it to its former glory. I’m ashamed it got forgotten, rusty and dusty but that’s entirely my fault.
Have our memories of 9/11 gotten rusty, dusty and forgotten, too? Have we forgotten how we held hands with strangers and cried and prayed, how some Muslims who truly love this country (I knew a whole extended family) cried along with us, since they knew what the attacks meant? Have we forgotten what it is like for America to win, or at least want to win?
Have we forgotten how we poured our hearts and souls into not just going to war in 2001, but rebuilding what was destroyed? There’s a yellow piece of serrated plastic on my desk from those days that signifies that heart and soul.
My brother worked for the company that built a new moving sidewalk for the Pentagon; they did it in weeks, rather than years as was predicted. Like the defense workers in World War II, they wanted to do something to help. Michael and all his coworkers all got scraps from the finished product to remind everyone that by cracky, they were Americans, and Americans would not be defeated by a bunch of evil cowards.
I hope we haven’t forgotten. There’s an entire generation now who have no memories of that morning, when the perfectly blue skies turned black, when the music stopped on the radio and was replaced by news, when the television didn’t even make mention of the start of football season, or the end of the World Series.
We must never let anyone forget. We must never allow anyone who wants to strengthen the enemies of freedom to forget, either; we certainly shouldn’t tolerate them in positions of power.
Like my old shotgun, America might be dusty, rusty and forgotten – but she can be cleaned up and resurrected. We just need to be willing to put in the work to make her great again.
