So here's the short of it,
We do remember. 

And here's the long.

Today was a long work day.

I had meetings scheduled all afternoon - one of them changed places at the last minute, so my carefully thought out travel routes weren't useful at all. And we had an after hours mandatory meeting that lasted until 6.  I wasn't even home until almost 7. Mostly I was so busy that I didn't even really have much time to reflect on the anniversary of the terrorist attacks until I was home.

You know I know it's normal on defining moments in our lives to reflect on where we were, what we were doing, and how we felt.  But sometime a few more years in the future I suppose, more objective scholars will be able to look at where we were and how our world went on an entirely new trajectory after that moment in time.  Of course, we all knew it would.  But none of us really even had any idea what that trajectory would really be.  I think we all knew there would be some kind of war against whoever was found to be responsible.  I don't think we anticipated that we'd be eleven years later and still be experiencing the deaths of U.S. Troops in some foreign country that most people hadn't even heard of at that time.  I don't think we could have believed that we'd be engaged in a war that would last, at this point, 5 years longer than World War II.

Yet, here we are. I will have to say that television has seared images of that day into our collective memories.  Perhaps much like the newsreels or newspaper images of our parents age.  I remember seeing that second plane fly into the second tower over and over and over.  But the images that impacted me so profoundly were those of people jumping or maybe falling from the towers.  I've read that fire fighters going into a flaming building are sometimes run over by the rodents and roaches fleeing from the flames.  I've heard that approaching fire instills a powerful flight response.

For everyone who died that day, for all those who are friends and family of someone who died, I know we all carry an enormous sadness.  As I reflect I think, too, of the more than 6,000 American Military Troops who have lost their lives in the 11 years since this War on Terror began.  I think of their families and friends.  And I carry an enormous sadness that in all our human time on earth we still don't have a better way to solve our differences than to kill one another.

This is not an anti-war diatribe by some passivist liberal.  It's just the meandering thoughts of one woman who wonders why one group of people would train young men to commit suicide by flying planes into buildings occupied by innocent civilians. And how they might have imagined that would ever bring about a result that they wanted.  Perhaps I just can't imagine the result that they wanted.

One thing is for sure.
September 11 is a day we'll always remember.