9/11

9/11.  I remember that day very well.  I was a counselor in Eureka, Nevada.  I came to school and heard the news.  We put a television out in the lunch room of the high school to watch the events unfold that day.  We watched the second plane crash into the second tower and knew the first was not an accident.  We watched the towers collapse and felt the weight of lives lost.  I don't think I will ever forget that day.

Now we have children who see these images as history.  They have no memory of that day.  So many events that I have witnessed have fallen into history.

Since September 11, 2001:

We surrendered our privacy and our civil rights to the Patriot Act to feel safe.

We sacrificed the lives, limbs, and families of our volunteer soldiers to feel like we have done something to someone about this attack on our homeland.

We have sacrificed many times more civilian lives as well as combatants than were lost that day.

We have paid billions of dollars to fight two simultaneous wars to defend our freedoms, money that could have been used here at home in so many ways.

We have struck targets in other sovereign nations with drones and troops.

We have detained foreign citizens in prison camps for years without trial.

And the Middle East is not better now than it was in 2001.  We now have the specter of ISIS in Syria.

We lost more than the thousands of innocent lives that day; we lost the moral high ground in the world, we lost the great country that we should be, that we believed we were, that we were told we were.

In the last few days, with thousands of refugees escaping the twin horrors of Assad and ISIS, some countries are accepting these victims into their borders, others are treating them like animals.  Our politicians wring their hands in our names, as our representatives, and worry about the security risks of accepting refugees into our country.

I don't remember the Statue of Liberty being bombed on 9/11...