Friday, September 11, 2009

8 Years Ago Today

Where were you eight years ago? Do you remember where you were when you first heard the news? What was your first thought? Is it really possible that America got attacked?

Eight years ago I was in my dorm room at college. I woke up like every morning for my 8 am and stumbled out of bed down to the bathroom. As I got closer to the bathroom I realized the TV was on in my RA's room and it was rather loud and his door was open. I heard the words on the TV but they didnt really sink in yet until after I was coming out of the bathroom and walked down to Jason's door to see what was going on. It was then I saw on the TV the now infamous images of the city of New York on that fateful morning. As soon as I saw that I rushed down to my room and turned on the tv, woke up my roomate (he wasnt too happy about it from what I remember as he didnt have class until later), and continued to get ready for my day while watching the events in New York. It didnt take long for it to finally really sink in what exactly was going on. Our nation had been attacked. Someone, somewhere in this world, had orchestrated a massive coordinated attack to destroy American lives.

Why? Why would someone want to attack our nation? These and so many more thoughts were swirling through my foggy brain early in the morning. It was a lot for the morning brain fog and it really didnt get resolved until later in my mind. There are still some things that I question to this day about that fateful morning. The lives of so many folks were snuffed out that day. We lost almost 3000 American lives. The one thing that still to this day shows me the true heart of the American people is the fact that while people were fleeing the building because of the unthinkable horrors that were taking place on those upper floors, New York's finest were going against that flow of people and rushing into those unthinkable horrors in hope that they could save as many people as possible. Also in the Pentagon in the devastation there we had folks forming a human chain clinging on to whatever they could of the person in front of them because they knew if they worked together they could get more folks out of that rubble.

I try to do a September 11th post every year but I dont always get one up. This year however is different. I have volunteered to participate in something called Project 2996. What is Project 2996 you ask? Project 2996 is a project that is designed to bring some 3000 bloggers together and each person take one victim of those horrific events 8 years ago and post a memorial for the person you are assigned. I was given the name of Nickie L Lindo.

Nickie L Lindo worked in the North Tower. This was the first tower struck that morning. At 8:46 AM that morning the terrorist turned American Airlines Flight 11 into a missile packed with enough jet fuel for flight 11 to fly across the United States. From what information I was able to track down about Nickie, she was a financial analyst. This means she was on those upper floors of Tower 1. I am not sure which floor exactly she was on but that really matters, whatever happened on those upper floors that day had to be just about the closest thing on earth to hell. All the evidence that you need of that fact is that many people chose to jump from the 94th floor and above to sure death so that they could escape that hell. Nickie was 31 years old. She left behind a husband and 2 children. She was taken away from her friends and her family by men who do not value human life.

I plea for all of us today to take some time and remember where you were that day when we came under attack. I plea for us to remember that tragedy and how on September 12th it did not matter if you were Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Black, White, Yellow, or Red, we were all Americans again and that bonded us together. For a brief while after that horrific tragedy we all stopped getting frustrated with the person that cut us off in traffic, we gladly let them in, we stopped getting frustrated with that person on the cell phone in front of you in lines, for that brief amount of time we were shocked into remembering the things that are more important to us. Please as we now are 8 years down the road from that horrific day, let us get back to that great time. Hug your friends, hug your family, call your mom, pray for our country, pray for our leaders. Nickie Lindo, I didnt know you but as we remember you and the rest of those snuffed out by barbarism that day, I will say a prayer for your family.

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