OUR VIEW: Unify for our futures

Ten years ago, on Sept. 11, 2001, if you turned your television on after 9 a.m., you would have been inundated by images of black smoke billowing from the tops of the two tallest World Trade Center buildings. Loops of the footage was played all day — hundreds of times per channel — of the once California-bound, hijacked planes crashing into the sides of the two towers. This was the day that not only would the New York City skyline look eerily empty, but Americans and their friends around the world would change forever.

Two other tragedies involving airplanes occurred that day with the martyred Flight 93 in rural Pennsylvania, and the Pentagon crash in Washington, D.C. This combination of events would be a generation-jilting episode — burned into the memories of every man, woman and child alive before and just after it happened. Just like the bombing of Pearl Harbor and President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the nation would come together for a few somber moments of reverence and patriotism, and eventually go back to its daily routines — while always remembering the events of 9/11.

During the months after terrorists put a hole in the sky, in NYC, American Flags were flying off store racks. New vocabulary, such as “We’ll never forget,” “let’s roll,” and “ground zero” emerged from the mouths of angry Americans. Even the most passive of peace lovers couldn’t get the images out of their minds of people leaping out of the World Trade Center from 100-story windows. Largely, the nation was looking for answers, and it wanted someone to blame.

Ten years later, how far have we come? Each year we observe the anniversary of that terrible event. News networks and various memorial efforts express remorse over the advent of the single largest terrorist act committed on American soil in decades. After those months of hyper-patriotism died, after we, as an American people, stopped coming together and forgetting our differences, where are we? The leaders of our country couldn’t possibly be at worse odds with one another. Is 9/11 now a mere keepsake? Is it the day when we all get together and stop fighting, just to go back to hating one another the day after?

Is it right that tragedy — dying and destruction — are the only things capable of bringing us together, as a whole, to look at the problems we face and genuinely want to work together to fix them? The U.S. faces serious threats to the well-being of its citizens every day. Hunger, poverty, unemployment and homelessness are rampant, and people often die at the hands of their fellow Americans. Why is 9/11 worse than any of that? — because somebody else did it to us?

Now is the time we take our nation’s future into our own hands. Now is the time we look at our brothers and sisters, and tell them we love them. Now is the time we stop complaining about the leaders of this country, and become the leaders of this country. Now is the time we look to tomorrow with hope that the next time we see tragedy, we won’t have to come together to endure, because we’ll have already created that unity — we’ll already be together.