9/11 Has Lessons to Teach Us

I watched on television in horror that Sept. 11 day in 2001 as the second of the Twin Towers crumbled onto the streets of Manhattan. The site of those falling buildings proved one of the darkest days in U.S. history, a disaster that galvanized this nation like nothing people had witnessed.

Not that Americans hadn’t seen horrific events before; we had seen plenty.

To our parents or grandparents, the attack on Pearl Harbor remains vivid. How about the bombing in Oklahoma City? And what person from my generation can’t still see the streets of urban America aflame in the 1960s, an event that ate at the nation’s core. Those riots in Detroit, Watts, Newark, Cleveland and elsewhere frightened us, pulling us inward instead of outward to find lasting solutions to these still unresolved problems of racism and poverty.

But 9/11 did the reverse. It brought strangers of all colors together. They shared tears and hugs and anger and frustrations. They shared love and displayed American grit, even as confusion reigned like a warlord over why this wickedness had visited U.S. soil.

(Continue to Justice Is Served)