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Copyrights reserved by the author. If you are in doubt, please click on 'Copyrights' and read the details. Amidst Remembrance, resolve to move forward. By J. G. Fabiano I knew every one of those people. I didn't know their faces or their names but I knew them all. They were husbands and wives working hard to make their families comfortable. They were children whose hard work and perseverance made their parents. They were also grandparents who were just about ready to enter a new stage of their lives doing something they had worked hard all their lives to be able to do. I still know them. I actually hated Paul Mann, the publisher of the Independent, when he called and asked me to revisit that day. I hated the concept of having to write about a time in my life when my soul was forced to change. Psychologists say many of us have changed because of that day. How the hell couldn't you be? I am sitting at the same desk I sat at on that horrific day of September 11. The young men and women in my classroom are different people but they are also the same in that they are striving to become as prepared as possible for their futures. Futures that are not as clear as they were a little more then a year ago. I also notice that, in many ways, they are not as innocent as the students who were with me last year: not as light or as easygoing. They have changed the same way I have changed.
Looking up at the same television set that I watched on that dreadful day I don't have to turn it on to see the same images on the blank screen. Images of brave men and women with unfamiliar faces running toward those giant towers to help. To do what they must have known was impossible. Images of heroes against a backdrop of hell that they must have known they wouldn't survive. I remember my students last year asking me if we were at war now? I didn't know how to answer because, yes, we were at war now&ldots;but not a war we had ever seen before. A war with an enemy we are still struggling to define and understand. A war with an enemy that won't fight by any rules we understand. A war we have to win just to go back to a simpler time that has probably gone forever. I remember one of my students muttering the words 'Independence Day,' the movie about aliens invading earth and destroying all our national landmarks, because that's how unreal it seemed. I smile as I remember back to before 9/11 when my biggest problem was if my students were getting what I was trying to teach them. A time when it seemed like a big deal if a selectman in my town quit. A time when an increase in my property tax seemed more important than anything else in the world. A time when words like Taliban or Bin Laden sounded like something I would use to clean my toilet. I realize those times are gone. They have been replaced by a constant fear that what happened on September 11 could happen again. They are replaced by a knowledge that the most powerful nation on earth is susceptible to people who live in caves and sincerely believe that to die by killing innocent people would give them an eternity in heaven. In the year since September 11 many other things have changed. The Constitution of my nation has been put in jeopardy because of a need for national security. Economically we, as a nation, are much weaker. The corporate titans of the booming nineties turned out to have feet of clay. Tens of thousands of innocent people have lost their life savings to crooks in thousand-dollar suits and multi-million dollar mansions. In the year since September 11 almost all our town budgets have been rejected because of fear of the future. Anybody who owns property in our town has been told that they are much richer now although none of us believes it. Some people want to make September 11 a national holiday, which would be a terrible mistake. We don't need a holiday to remember what happened, just like my parents don't need a holiday to remember what happened at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. For the rest of our lives we will never be able to forget. We won't forget the brave men and women on that third plane over Pennsylvania who knew what they had to do and found the courage to do it even though it meant certain death. We won't forget the devotion of men and women who worked 24 hours a day, seven days a week, sifting through the smoking debris for the remains of the innocent so we could honor them all. I cannot enjoy the media blitz that is currently underway, forcing all of us to re-live the shock of what happened only one year ago. I would much rather see images of our nation rebuilding itself, of picking itself up from this catastrophe and moving forward. The Pentagon has been rebuilt and the land that supported two of our country's greatest architectural marvels has been cleared and is ready to be built on again. That is what interests me now, that is what holds my enthusiasm. I take an interest in the plans for the southern tip of Manhattan and I follow the discussions in the newspapers about the plans. I want to see something magnificent rise up from this act of hatred against us to demonstrate the strength of our national spirit and resolve. To show the whole world that we, as a nation, are undiminished by what has been done to us, that we will never be defeated by acts such as this. My work has always been to build for the future, usually by building young minds. I won't forget the past but I am ready to move forward now. I need to move forward. It matters more to me know where we go from here than where we have been! The End
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