If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
The Blog
We have yet to see the full toll of 9/11 among first responders, even 10 years out. All relevant resources should be made available to address the burden of illness shouldered by these brave souls who rushed toward the very thing most of us with just average courage would flee.
The Psalms are poems -- and indeed they are exquisite -- but I'm sorry the President wasn't able to keep God out of it. The names of the 3,000 dead would have been sermon and poem enough.
There were few physical similarities among the kids and their experiences -- cultural, social, familial -- were divergent as well. Yet, they shared a common denominator: their birth year, 2001.
As we commemorate 9/11, we should remember that this is also the 10th anniversary of 9/12 -- the day when the shock began to wear off, and the country began to decide what its reaction was going to be.
In commemorating the 9/11 tragedy we dare not practice a submissive, counterfeit faith that assumes our own sinfulness and G-d's righteousness. We did nothing to earn this.
The question we haven't answered since 9/11 is whether a society such as ours has the will and moral resources to defend itself as a wellspring of civic disciplines that sustain a politics of reasonable hope against a politics of fear and misdirected resentment.
After 9/11, America embarked on a path of revenge and vendetta, shedding the blood of thousands of innocent Afghans and Iraqis. Our gallant troops died avenging my son's death and the deaths of every precious soul we lost on 9/11. Who benefited? What did we gain?
Today, an entire nation remembers. And reflects. Be sure to check out our ongoing liveblog, with links to all of HuffPost's 9/11 coverage -- including Andrea Stone and John Rudolf on continuing national security vulnerabilities, and Tom Zeller and Lynne Peeples on the environmental impact of the attacks -- as well as links to the best 9/11 stories from around the web. We are also featuring a truly remarkable collection of pieces from our Patch network. We asked each of our 999 Patch editors to identify someone in their town whose life had been altered by 9/11 -- or something that had been forever changed. The stories are as moving as they are varied, including a Midwestern firehouse chaplain who was on a truck heading to New York as soon as the towers fell; a pilot who left the cockpit to run for office after 9/11; and the school where the youngest passenger on Flight 93 had been enrolled. Please check them out -- and add your own memories to the conversation.
Today, as we commemorate the tenth anniversary of the atrocity of 9/11, we must continue to stand by our first responders and provide them with the tools and resources they need to handle a major national emergency and save lives.
Failure to understand or act on intelligence goes a long way toward explaining the attacks of September 11, 2001. On this 10th anniversary of those events, we seem, once again, not to grasp the import of the information being provided by our intelligence.
In the post-2008 return to 9/11 style intimidation by framing, conservatives have been winning. They have protected industry from regulation and successfully attacked the very idea of the public -- public education, employees, unions, parks, housing, and safety nets.
A decade after 9/11, I've been thinking a lot about heroes. I think about the ones that should have been, but ultimately couldn't carry the weight of the moment. I think about the ones we'll never know, or even know about, but should be able to recite by name.
This September, what will you do to remember? Will you take time to maybe help paint a school, or plant a tree, or tutor a child? Wherever you are from you can demonstrate the common humanity that binds us together and makes our societies and our world stronger.
Every magazine and paper and news show seems to want to define the post-9/11 decade, but for those of us who lost our spouses, children, parents, and siblings, there is no defining or encapsulating.
It haunts me to my grave that prior to 9/11 I should have pounded on the doors of editorial writers and presidents demanding that they take the warnings of terrorist attacks seriously. Unlike the first responders, I cannot say that I did my duty.
