Remembering September 11, 2001

I was unemployed during September 11, 2001 and got out of bed around 10 AM that morning. I went downstairs to find my wife sitting on the couch with our newborn daughter. She informed me that two planes had hit the World Trade Center. I felt sad as I watched fire pouring from the towers and then sat in shock when the first tower crumbled to the ground. After that, I knew the second would collapse also.

Another flight had crashed into the Pentagon and then there were reports of a missing fourth plane. That plane was Flight 93 which crashed about twenty miles from our home in SW Pennsylvania.

Sometime during the day, my sadness turned into anger. I knew the country would be engaging in war soon, and I was a little scared like everyone else. Then, I remembered these words from Ronald Reagan:

"We will not tolerate these attacks by outlaw states. We will not cave in."

"Today, we have done what we had to do. They counted on America to be passive. They counted wrong. "

"You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children's children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done."

Those words were spoken years before the 9/11 attacks, but they were more relevant that anything anybody else could have said on that day.