Monday, September 17, 2007

www.whiteville.com

By JEFFERSON WEAVER
Staff writer

I spent a sweaty half-hour last week remembering something none of us should ever forget.

I started not to write a column about Sept. 11, 2001, since I knew several thousand other folks would be sharing their own stories about the day. Many of them did, and quite a few did a better job than I could hope to.

But this one may be one of the last marking this year’s anniversary, and there’s a reason for my lack of timeliness.

I don’t want people to forget about Patriot’s Day a day or two or three afterward. I think we ought to remember it every single day.

Too many Americans have either forgotten or misted over or confused that day’s events. Some even tread in the blood of those who died and blame our country for the acts committed against us. So many folks seem to forget about the fact that a bunch of people decided to kill Americans on American soil simply because we are Americans.

We’d do well to remember the reasons for that day, but all too often we can’t get past our own recollections. Just as some Americans lost sight of the reasons we fought World War II, and others forget how the bright star that was Kennedy’s administration became the welfare state of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, people can’t get it into their heads that we aren’t fighting a nation, but a movement. To do that, we have to conquer some nations. It’s not like other wars, where buying the ground with American support and American blood meant the bad guys would eventually give up. The bad guys are mobile now, and if we knock their nest from one tree, they’ll just find a new one.

I’ll admit I only briefly considered the bigger picture last week as we stood on the lawn at Whiteville’s City Hall and watched a new American flag climbing a pole. I thought more about how even the simplest plans are sometimes cast aside by the most violent means.
As I have mentioned before, Sept. 11 was my father’s birthday. The day we now call 9/11 would have been the Old Man’s 86th birthday, the first after his passing.

God had provided me with a new, good job for which I was officially hired that day. I planned to spend the day with Mother, maybe visiting the cemetery, or doing whatever widows require of their youngest sons on significant dates after fathers die.

I didn’t plan to spend the day worrying about my friend Misty and her boyfriend (they worked near the Towers). I didn’t plan to spend the day worrying about my sister in D.C. I didn’t plan to spend an hour tearing through a dusty box of maps to find a dog-eared copy of a Pennsylvania tourism map to figure out where the heck Shanksville was. My beloved wife was still a radio announcer then, but instead of spinning country music, she was managing a patched-together jury-rig of a news feed and trying to remain calm herself.
Of course, I doubt any of us planned to spend the day as we did.It was to be a time of celebration and healing for my family. That wasn’t to be the case. I won’t say nothing will be the same, although more things changed than I can count.

There were even some good things that came out of that day; I saw young people becoming patriotic again.

I made friends with a big city reporter who was curious about country newspapers. He saw the second plane strike the tower from his apartment windows. He saw bodies stacked on the dock near his newspaper office.

I saw people appreciating their first responders again.

There was even some darn good music that came out because of that day. Allen Jackson’s song is still as thought-provoking as Toby Keith’s is inspirational, even six years later.

For the record: Misty and her beau were fine. My sister was working in a different military division, so she was nowhere near the Pentagon. We found Shanksville. Miss Rhonda started playing music again the next day, since we needed normalcy, and there were only so many tears anyone could shed. I started my new job the next week.

Six years later, my other sister’s son is heading to Iraq to fight terrorists, insurgents, or whoever decides to be our enemy. I’m darn proud of him.

Our Congress has completely forgotten the unity they showed on the Capital steps as the smoke still tinted the air over the Pentagon. I’m disgusted with them.

And even with the numbness that has set in through time – the same type of numbness my parents felt after Pearl Harbor and throughout World War II, the numbness of my aunts and mother in Korea, the same numbness felt by my siblings during Vietnam – I worry sometimes.

Don’t we all?

I know God has a plan, and that my soul is safe for eternity, no matter how many misled nutjobs fly airplanes into buildings.

I’m not a fraidy-cat – indeed, if you’ve ever read my column, you should know this. But I still have a certain amount of worry, sprinkled with occasional doses of something like fear. And I hate that. Fear means the bad guys succeeded.

Fear meant that I had to write stories about classes on things like chemical/biological/nuclear weapons. I took those classes, too, along with health department nurses, social workers, firefighters, and sheriff’s deputies. Fear meant distrust, even for just a second, for people I’d previously liked, but since they practiced Islam and were Middle Eastern, I had to wonder. That distrust made me angry at myself, since I don’t like to tarbrush anyone.

For that reason, I loathe the terrorists. I once pitied the people who hate our country to the point that they feel they must tear down and destroy anything that proves them wrong. Instead, I wish, even 24 years after failing my military physical, that I could offer something other than words in the battle against those who hate us.

Although I know some Christians who don’t or can’t or won’t, I pray for those folks who hate us so, just as I pray for the ones they killed on Sept. 11, and the ones who have died since then.

But I pray for our country, too, and I pray that we never have to set aside another day to honor our dead at home, and I hope that someday we can forget those who murdered them – and never, ever again, be the slightest bit afraid.