Saturday, September 11, 2004

Remembering:






I initially had no intention of blogging anything about September 11 today, but I was sitting here in the office catching up on paperwork, listening to The Rising as my own private memorial service when I surfed over to Instapundit as a reprieve from cholesterol levels and worker's comp forms and came across this.

It brought my paperwork to a halt. Watching all those images from that day, I remembered how, when that first plane hit and we were all wondering how on earth a pilot could be so off the mark as to hit the World Trade Center, then the second plane hit and we knew then it wasn't an accident. I remembered thinking how could the hospitals in the city possibly handle all the wounded. Then, by the end of the day, it was clear the hospitals had no trouble handling the wounded. There weren't many wounded. All those people were just.....gone. It was the funeral parlors and the gravediggers and the clergy who would have trouble handling the surge in business in the days to come. But not the hospitals.

And I remembered the anger and the grief of those days. Then I went over to Lileks and was reminded of just how measured our response to the horror:

I’ve no doubt that if Seattle or Boston or Manhattan goes up in a bright white flash there will be those who blame it all on Bush. We squandered the world’s good will. We threw away the opportunity to atone, and lashed out. Really? You want to see lashing out? Imagine Kabul and Mecca and Baghdad and Tehran on 9/14 crowned with mushroom clouds: that’s lashing out. Imagine the President in the National Cathedral castigating Islam instead of sitting next to an Imam who's giving a homily. Mosques burned, oil fields occupied, smart bombs slamming into Syrian palaces. We could have gone full Roman on anyone we wanted, but we didn’t. And we won’t.

No, we won't. But we must keep up the steady fight.

UPDATE: Jim Miller notes how soon we forget.

 

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