This Sunday will mark the 10th anniversary of the Muslim terrorists’ attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon, which killed nearly 3,000 innocent civilians.
It was, and remains, one of the all-time dastardly deeds of violence perpetrated upon people who weren’t at war and who hadn’t, other than in the minds of the madmen who dreamed up and carried out the attacks, done anything to deserve to die that way.
It also remains one of the most seminal moments in American history – one that instantly changed all of us, and not necessarily for the better.
While most of us don’t recoil at the sound of an airplane, the attacks provided justification for heightened security measures that we all live with every time we go to the airport. We have to arrive sooner to check our baggage and subject ourselves to sometimes intrusive searches of our persons and our possessions. We have to answer questions if our papers aren’t in order.
The attacks, together with the steady, rapid growth of Islam, particularly in in Europe, have contributed to a sense of unease – or worse – in many Americans toward people from the Middle East. In particular, the battle last fall over the “Ground Zero mosque” re-awakened many Americans’ anger toward Muslims. However, though FBI crime statistics indicate that hate crimes against Muslims increased from 28 in 2000 to 481 in 2001, the actual number of hate crimes against people of Islamic faith remain lower than those perpetuated against Jews.
The War on Terror has cost us, not only in the lives of the 6,000-plus servicemen and women who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan, but in dollars – an estimated $1.29 trillion by the end of this year.
In response to the attacks, we have seen our government assume liberties that 10 years ago would have been shouted down. In addition to what happens at the airport, we have seen warrantless wiretaps. The Patriot Act has given government increased authority to regulate financial transactions, expanded justification for deporting suspected terrorists, allowed searches of business records, and generally justified the treatment of suspected terrorists who have been jailed for years without trials.
The fact is, life will never be the same as it was before the fateful morning of Sept. 11, 2001. As a whole, we have less trust in our government. We have lower standing with the world than we did 10 years ago, after marching into Iraq and Afghanistan.
We value the services of our emergency workers much more than we did before we watched them dash into the smoke, dust and flames to rescue people from the burning World Trade Center.
As a nation, we apparently had not completely forgotten God, a fact evidenced by the amount of prayer that suddenly appeared on people’s lips following the tragedy. Our sense of self-reliance, self-satisfaction, self-assuredness and, in a sense, self-worth was breached by these attacks that caught us totally off-guard – sitting ducks.
America has struggled since Sept. 11, 2001. We are not what we were, in the eyes of the nation or in our own eyes. We have experienced a recession more severe than any in nearly a century.
But we have also been resilient. We’ve been diligent in preventing further attacks and we have had some remarkable successes. Though we will live with the legacy of those attacks for the rest of our lives, we have shown that we can adjust to fact the threat that has come upon us. We’re thankful that our elite troops finally cornered Osama Bin Laden.
None of us who watched the attacks that day 10 years ago will ever be the same – any more than our forebears who heard on the radio that Pearl Harbor had been bombed some 50 years earlier.
We need to continue to be resilient and forceful in our efforts to defend ourselves against terrorist who don’t play by any rules. We need to support our troops in foreign lands, who are putting their lives on the line to further our cause in this area. We need to remember that, at least for many of us, we still trust in God and we shouldn’t wait until terrorists ram planes into our skyscrapers to pray for His mercy and protection.