Americans are slowly forgetting about 9/11. It’s becoming a part of history, something removed, something detached. Americans who experienced it are looking back on the day as if it happened outside of their lifetime. Obama, ever the history revisionist, now even wants to turn today into a “National Service Day,” further reducing the impact the day will have on our psyches.
We cannot afford to make that mistake. We cannot afford to forget any detail of what happened that day. September 11th was a turning point in American history. We cannot forget that eight years ago today, 3000 Americans were murdered. They didn’t die in a natural disaster, they didn’t die in a war and they didn’t die of cancer or gun violence or any of 1000 other maladies.
They were brutally and senselessly murdered.
Eight years have passed, but I remember that day vividly, down to every detail.
For Americans to whom 9/11 has become just a date, another page in history to be viewed, not something we all experienced in our lifetimes, let me remind them what happened that day.
Terrorists, radical ideologues who hate us, hate our freedoms and hate our way of life, decided that on this day, thousands of Americans should die. What they did was not a war of conquest, not a war of territory, not a war of resources and not even a war of survival.
What Al Qaeda did that day was kill 3000 Americans for no reason other than to kill them. They murdered innocent people simply so they could say, look, we killed people. They killed mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts and cousins. They killed business people, they killed delivery drivers, police officers, firefighters and many, many more.
This attack was an attack on us all. The war Al Qaeda brought to our doorstep was not waged army to army; it was an attack on the soul of America, waged against civilians. We cannot forget this fact. They killed our fellow Americans to try and weaken our resolve and dampen our spirits. They did not understand us well enough to know they would not be successful.
We cannot forget what happened eight years ago today. We must not. We must remember that vigilance is the price we must pay for our freedom. We must remember that we face an enemy, a cold, heartless and violent enemy who thinks nothing of murdering children and families simply because we have freedom.
We must not forget, and we also must not let anything weaken the resolve we all felt on September 12th. The liberals and the politicians and the media tell us today that such thoughts are “unproductive,” and maybe we should just “move on.” To them, 9/11 is something to bury and forget.
As more and more time interjects itself between today and 9/11, some Americans have lost that edge we had the day after, and start to question themselves and say, “How much do we need to do to defend America? How hard should we push back?”
As President Bush stood atop the rubble and told the emergency crews working there, “America hears you…and soon…the people who knocked down these buildings will hear you.”
The answer to the question is as much and as hard as it takes. We will never surrender, we will never back down…and we will never forget.
