Divided We Fall

Driving around Escondido this morning I realized it was September 11th. A fire station had a banner on one of its trucks celebrating FDNY. My first thought was "what about FDLA?" Those guys are dying right now... Later a "never forget" hand written sign on a school fence made me realize the date.

There wasn't much going on online about September 11th, so I skipped on over to Fark.com. The first original thread from the 9/11/01 attacks was posted and I read through the comments, up until Drew started telling people to move onto the next thread (I do wonder now what other "not news" articles were posted, if any). It was insane that all the major US news networks had shut down due to system overload. Fark was the only source of information for a great number of people.

I was in high school. The driver of our morning carpool shouted towards my mom, "a plane hit the World Trade Center. Turn on the news!" My first period, colorguard, was our weekly study day and the band director played the news on the radio. That's pretty much all I remember outside of knowing that that day was going to change the way things were and that it would have much more significance to me later on. Now I kind of wish I had been older in 2001, at least old enough to realize the significance of the terrorist attack at the time. I appreciate it now, but that night I couldn't share my mom's sorrow, and certainly couldn't share her tears. Maybe it was just too surreal for me to handle then...

In reading the original Fark thread and todays thread I learned much more about how that day changed the lives of Americans everywhere. One man commented how he had gone home that night to hold his 2 month old child in his arms and wondered what world he brought this person into. Another said:

On top of all the deaths, injuries and lives forever destroyed by this day - how sad it is to think that 9/11 ultimately tore this country in two rather than brought us together. Many days it seems that we have just become a nation split up into two hate-filled camps - both sides unable to look at the other one objectively, neither side able to put the country's needs ahead of their need to destroy the other side. Bin Laden's enduring legacy is that we have lost our ability to be the United States ... now we are just Red and Blue - at war with ourselves.

A haunting sentiment. We were so united after the attacks, but somehow have since crumbled into a divided state where Republicans won't even date Democrats and Democrats blame Republicans for every evil in our world. We are divided and if we continue to be divided we will fall like every other empire in the world's written history.