Here's what I heard:
Can you believe its been ten years? I remember Sept. 11, 2001 like it was yesterday. I woke up to 99.1 KGGI blaring on my dorm radio at University of Redlands, but it wasn't music I heard, it was a newscast about the attack. It was right after the first plane hit the tower. I made a quick call home, including one to find a way to contact a childhood friend, Kristal, who was a flight attendant and worked in the New York area. She's the first person I had thought about. I walked out into the common room of the dorms to find my fellow college students huddled around the TV and we watched as the second plane hit and then as the towers collapsed.
It was surreal. The news network we were watching thought it was debris from the plane hitting that fell from the windows high above the New York City skyline. The camera zoomed in and quickly zoomed back out because it wasn't debris. It was a man. A man in a suit. A man who had felt so helpless and who was so scared that he jumped out of a window.
I think that is when it hit me the hardest. That's when what I was watching became real.
I was scheduled to board a plane with my volleyball team the following week. We were supposed to fly to Nashville for a tournament. But flights were cancelled and we couldn't go. I remember feeling somewhat relieved that I wouldn't have to board a plane.
What if it happened again? What if they chose the plane I was on?
I had been scared.
I've been thinking about this a lot. And the rest of this post may piss some people off — but it's my blog. My thoughts. My opinion — so if you don't want to read it, you don't have to.
Fear. "An unpleasant emotion caused by the belief that someone or something is dangerous, likely to cause pain, or a threat." That's what Google says.
It was just a short time ago when the Hemet Police officers were being attacked. They had had bombs placed underneath their cars, guns rigged to shot at their heads when the gate to their Gang Task Force headquarters was opened, city cars were blown up. It was a terrifying time for the city and it had come on the heels of an incident where a boy had shot, killed, and burned his "friend" in a bonfire in his backyard.
More fear. I stopped running at night. I would replay my MMA training scenarios in my head when I saw a scary-looking person around in a parking lot — thinking about all of the ways I knew I could bring him down. I began to look over my shoulder more often and I stopped making eye contact with strangers. What if they had bad intentions?
My brother-in-law recently wrote a paper on the Hemet police attacks. He asked me, as a former reporter during the time of the attacks, for a quote about what it did to the community. Here's what I told him.
"The repeated attacks on local law enforcement instilled fear in the community. People began to question their safety. If police officers were vulnerable and the offenders were not caught, certainly the general public felt threatened. It was an act of terrorism and the sense of fear it produced was real. Even the arrest of the suspects didn't ease the minds of the public. I think the fear the attacks caused is still present today. Maybe not a fear of those particular suspects attacking again, but a fear caused by the realization that no city is truly safe from terrorists."
I began to think about terrorism. Terrorism is named that because it goes deeper than the single acts of violence. It is bigger.
It makes people question one another, makes them view people who may be different than them as suspect. Fear makes us irrational. It makes us do and say questionable things. It makes us want to "shoot first, ask questions later."
My former editor, Kari, once told me that she believes that people either live in fear or live in love. To live in fear is to not live at all. It's to act scared, to not risk anything, to freeze. To live in love makes us free, it gives us courage to live the life we dream. It was true and I agreed.
I came across a quote that said "There are very few monsters who warrant the fear we have of them." Andre Gide said this. He was a writer and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1947.
I think this is true. Yet so many people walk around afraid of those who are different. You see, ten years after the Twin Towers were attacked, the fear that violent act produced is still very real. You hear it everyday. You heard it in the debate about whether or not a mosque should be built near Ground Zero in New York City. You heard it when Bin Laden was killed.
I saw photos of Bin Laden's head with a bullet in it posted all over Facebook. They weren't even real. They were made in Photoshop. The government chose not to release the actual photos.
You know, many people celebrated the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., too. It's true.
I know. You're ticked right now. You don't want me to compare King to a terrorist like Bin Laden, right? That's not fair, right? One was obviously good and one was obviously evil. Right! Right? Really? Who are you to assign value to a human life? Who are you to say one is more valuable than the other? Do you know their soul? Now you're fuming. I know.
"But, Val, one used his life to try to destroy people! The other tried to bring people together!" you may say. Yes. But I'm not making a judgement on who was better than the other. I'm saying that a human life, good or bad, or still a life.
King once said, "Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."
So when we celebrate the death of a person, aren't we acting in darkness? Aren't we celebrating the same evil that Bin Laden may have been celebrating when he watched the people throw themselves out of the melting towers? In both instances, death is being celebrated. Which one is right? Is there a "right"?
I see those slogans "I will never forget!" plastered all over cars and the Internet. And, to be honest, I won't forget Sept. 11, 2001.
But I want to. I want to forget the evil. Holding on to what another man did to us in sin will only bound us and hold our hearts captive. It will not free us. Forgetting, however, will free our hearts from hate. Now you're really mad at me, aren't you? You are correct in thinking that I'm telling you to forget. Forget the sin.
If we choose to remember the hate and carry that hate on, we are not doing the victims of 9/11 justice. We are fuming the flames for it to happen again.
Those of you who read my blog or who know me, know I'm a Christian. I love the Lord. And I believe that He would forgive. That He would love harder in hopes of saving lives. Not hating harder in hopes of punishing lives. He loves all equally.
So try and forget. Isn't that what Christ did for us? Did he not forget our sin? Did He not die so that we were free from it? So why should we remember the sin of another? What if Christ decided to "never forget" that lie you told your husband, but confessed to Christ? What if He chose to place a yellow ribbon on your rear view mirror every day to remind you of that time you cheated, lied, or stole? What if you could never escape it? You would be driven mad and think Him unloving. But He's not. And you're free from those sins.
Every time you choose to love, to smile at someone who you may perceive to be "trashy" or "shady," you give love a little more power and hate a little less.
My prayer for this country is that we are freed from the death grip that fear has on our hearts. My prayer is that we embrace one another and show more love and less hate. I will attempt to forget, attempt to forgive, and live in love.
John 12:35 says "Then Jesus told them, 'You are going to have the light just a little while longer. Walk while you have the light, before darkness overtakes you. The man who walks in the dark does not know where he is going.'"
On this anniversary of 9/11, I'm committing to love more. To love those who are different, to love those who have done me wrong, to love those who the world perceives as evil. Because if we aren't loving, we are hating. And hate is destructive.
I will not allow terrorism to win. By celebrating death and acting in hate, we allow the terrorists to win. We give them power. I will not allow the sin of a few make it okay to hate many. I will not allow terrorists to cause me to be afraid of people of a different race, color, or creed.
My prayer is that we truly do choose to rise out of those ashes — not to take our revenge, but to love and spread light so that darkness does not overcome.
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