Someone commented a while back that she liked my business card holder.
I explained to her that it is much more than just a pedestrian piece of desk furniture: it’s a reminder of when our country was hurt, and came back stronger and prouder.
The piece of plastic in question is a scrap from a moving sidewalk built here in North Carolina; the plant was the only one in America that could build it. My brother worked there, and on Sept. 11, 2001, he gathered with the rest of the second shift workers just clocking in, alongside those who were heading home for the night.
Everyone was still in shock from the events of that morning, when planes were flown into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the fourth was crashed by passengers in a field in Pennsylvania. They were shocked and angry and confused, but they still had to work, and they pushed through the emotions of the day. The same went for the second shift; my brother hadn’t been told not to come to work, so he was there.
The gathered workers were told about a new project that would start that very evening; whatever else was being made at that time would be set aside for the time being. There would be some emergency retooling, and it would be hard, but it was necessary.
The fires weren’t even out, damage assessments were incomplete, and bodies still being recovered but the country needed the Pentagon functioning again, and that meant they needed a new moving walkway.
Brother Mike and his fellow workers turned out; the walkway was completed ahead of schedule, something that people said couldn’t be done. On top of that it was better than before.
Everyone who worked on it, no matter how much or how little, received a piece of yellow plastic trimmed from the walkway as it was being completed. Three grooves with tall sides on top, a channel with thicker walls on the bottom.
Like Americans always have, they turned out when their country needed them.
So did many others, in bigger, bolder ways during those dark, frightening days of what should have been a beautiful Indian Summer. Folks gave so much; from the firefighters, rescue crews, police and every day people who stepped up and ran back into the flames, all the way to those who spent weeks and months clearing debris, or helping desperate family members fill out missing person forms, cataloging hair brushes and toothbrushes and anything that might provide a DNA match for those folks still deemed missing, their bodies and pieces of their bodies found in the smoking rubble of the center of Manhattan. I’ve met quite a few of those folks over the intervening 24 years, and whenever the date is mentioned, their eyes change.
There were others who saw from afar the hell unleashed in Washington and New York and came through when their country needed them as well. They are the ones like my nephew who fought to get back into the military. He could have gone on living a normal life, having been discharged from the Navy with an injury, but his country had been hurt. Like his father, his grandfather and so many before him, he insisted that he have the chance to serve again. He did, honorably and with merit, going through his own version of hell in Iraq and Afghanistan. I heard secondhand about an old friend I truly need to track down; he officially retired from the military on Sept. 8, and was looking forward to a well-earned rest and maybe a “normal” job where he could enjoy his daughter and the child he and his wife were expecting.
Instead he insisted on tearing up those retirement papers and reenlisting, reminding people whose lives and careers and backsides he had saved that they owed him. He finally retired again after spending several years teaching young soldiers everything he could. His country needed him, and he stepped up.
Do you recall those days? The morning when it was so bright and beautiful, yet everything fell apart in an instant?
Miss Lois and I were going to visit my father’s grave that day; it would have been his 86th birthday. I was excited because I would find out that afternoon when I would start my new job, the first good one I’d had in a while. Miss Rhonda worked late at the radio station, so I let her sleep in, only to wake her when the second plane hit in New York.
So many plans changed that day. Rhonda still went to work, Mother and I went to Papa’s grave, but there was a new fear in every heart when one airliner, then another passed over our town, headed for the nearest major airport. Every jet we saw might be the next one to come crashing to the ground.
Do you recall the days afterward, when we held hands with strangers, and helped folks we’d been spittin’ at the week before? Remember how even the most bitter enemies in Washington came together to sing and pray for each other? Remember how when we stood back up as an American people, we literally and figuratively sharpened our knives and tightened our boots, bandaged the wounds and dried the tears, and showed the world what America can do.
Sadly, the politicians and bureaucrats decided that actually winning a war wasn’t a good objective, that simply eliminating the threat of a terror state wasn’t a good idea, unless we tried to rebuild it into something the Western mind could comprehend.
Do you recall those days when we thought hope was gone, then hope was born anew?
I do.
For years, I wondered where those Americans went. The ones who were patriotic, who wanted to help others, who took pride in their country and their – American-ness, for lack of a better word. Thankfully that seems to be resurging, much to the dismay of those who never loved this country in the first case, and have tried so hard to remake it into something that would have had the Founding Fathers oiling their muskets and kissing their families goodbye.
There are adults alive today who were not born when 9/11 occurred. That amazes me to no end. There are serving soldiers, Marines, sailors, airmen, Coast Guardsmen, and first responders who were in their mother’s wombs or not even in their parents’ plans when the towers fell and the Pentagon burned and a field was destroyed in Shanksville.
I pray fervently that they will never have to go through a time like our country saw in those days of 2001.
If they do, however, I have all ideas that there will be some who will be willing to rush back into the flames, or wait in line at a recruiting station, or work extra shifts at a plant that makes moving sidewalks — because their country needs them, and they love their country.
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