9/11

You know what this blog post is about. All any American needs to hear is "9/11" and images of the World Trade Center on fire flashes through the mind. A mix of emotions including anger, frustration, and fear takes over.

It's an iconic date like few in American history. 9/11. It's the day that international terrorism attacked us on our own soil. It's the day that international terrorism violated all of us.

The key is that it was international terrorism. After all, 4/19 doesn't come close to evoking the evoking a sense of violation for most Americans that 9/11 does.

Don't remember 4/19? That's the date that a pair of clean-cut white American males parked a van loaded with fertilizer and fuel oil in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and then detonated it. The resulting explosion killed nearly 650 people, including children who were in the building's daycare center.

I've never completely understood why so many people have apparently forgotten 4/19/95. The idea that American citizens were so angry at the government that they planned and executed such an attack absolutely chills me to my core. Ever since that day, I've wondered how many more clean cut Americans are out there thinking about striking a blow against the government by blowing something up.

Many words will be written and spoken today about 9/11 and the necessity that we never forget that day. I certainly won't. But one of the disturbing lessons that some people have apparently learned is that Muslims are evil--after all, it was a bunch of Muslims who struck us on 9/11. None of those people think Catholics are evil, in spite of the fact that one of the 4/19 bombers was Catholic. Both of those attackers were Army veterans, and nobody thinks veterans are evil.

I sincerely hope that Americans who work to never forget 9/11 also remember that it was members of al Qaeda who attacked us on 9/11. That's the group that means to harm the United States; al Qaeda, not Muslims.