I hesitate to write this, as it isn’t directly related to ham radio, but it did have an indirect impact as my technician class gladly stood down for a night as the Red Cross started their efforts to plan their response to the Patriot’s Day Bombing that happened 5 hours earlier and 70 miles to the north of us. (The class is held in an American Red Cross facility)
I remind my wife and kids of this frequently, and by voicing it aloud, I remind myself. We are VERY lucky to live in the United States. Look to Israel, I say. Almost daily a bus blows up, or bomb goes off. People die randomly, but life goes on. People still fall in love, get married, have kids, go to soccer games, etc. Life must go on. I tell my kids but for an accident of where they were born, they could be living in Africa and enduring unbelievable hardships — struggling daily against nature and man just to survive. Even so, life MUST go on.
I am at the top of a long list of people that take the United States for granted. While I think we have been losing our liberty at an alarming rate since 9/11, becoming afraid of our own shadow, and spending trillions of dollars fighting an enemy that tries to break our will with a few dollars of chemicals, in truth we will never be entirely safe. Random stuff happens. People die — we all die — it is part of life. It is how we live that honors those who have died. If we live in fear, we do a disservice to those who died getting us where we are today.
I believe the most valuable lesson from 9/11 is that America does have the resources to bring people to justice even a decade later, and we DO live on. I hope that same tenacity is applied to this event. I can’t help but notice the difference between 9/11 and 4/15/2013. After 9/11 there was nothing but 24/7 TV coverage of the event for days. Public events were closed nationally. This time some TV was interrupted last night, but it is back to showing soap operas today. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing (life must go on, right, and getting back to routine is a great first step), but perhaps it is a sign of how jaded we’ve become in the past decade. People say that the United States lost its innocence when President Kennedy was assassinated. But I think we really lost our innocence on 9/11 after being isolated from the world’s ills for hundreds of years.
My thoughts and prayers go out to those families who lost loved ones or have suffered injuries, both physical and mental. And I am, as always, grateful for those who stepped up and ran toward toward the sights and sounds of disaster, despite an almost overwhelming urge to run the other way.
