9/11 Twenty Years Later

On that Tuesday morning in September 2001, I was in my office in Hyannis, Massachusetts on Cape Cod, engaged in a conference call with perhaps twenty other people from around the world. Suddenly, one of the callers, a woman in London, interrupted and said, “A plane just flew into the World Trade Center in New York. It’s on the telly.” I asked only one question: “Can you tell what the weather’s like in New York?” Her response, “Oh, yes, I can see blue sky, so it must be good weather.” I simply said, “Then it also must be a terrorist attack. Planes don’t fly into Manhattan skyscrapers when the weather is good.” 

With that I stopped the call, rescheduling it for another day, and went to our corporate dining room where I knew there was a large screen TV. Of course, when the second plane crashed into the south tower, everyone knew we’d suffered a terrorist attack. This began our 20-year journey to the present day and its confusions.

This Sunday morning our local newspaper devoted its entire first section to the vicious terrorist attack on September 11, 2001 and it’s aftermath. This is a good thing, and I look forward to making my way through the series of articles as I try to relax this Sunday afternoon. But our newspaper’s primary, front-page headline made me cringe. The paper? The Villages Daily Sun, and the headline read:

After the towers fell, we were frightened and angry. We ached for security, and we’re willing to trade some civil liberties to get it. 

Now, unlike the so-called journalist who penned this headline, I can speak only for myself. So what’s wrong with the headline? Well, I certainly agree with part of his first sentence. I was angry. No doubt about that. In fact, I don’t believe I’ve ever been angrier. But of one thing I can be sure, I was not frightened. Only a coward, a fool, or  one of little faith would be frightened in the wake of a terrorist attack like 9/11. Sadly, we have many of each in our nation. I pray for them, that they will open their hearts to God’s gift of faith to obliterate their fears.

I also turned immediately to prayer, not through fear, but because I knew we must, as a people, turn to God. We must beg for His help and direction, for His grace in dealing with this horrendous attack on our nation, this act of war. And because of its source, this attack was actually an attack on Judeo-Christian society, on Western Civilization, or what’s left of it. 

As for the second sentence of today’s headline, I completely disagree. Back on that first September 11th, I did not, in any way, “ache for security.” No, as an old Navy pilot, as a retired Navy Captain, I wished I were about 20 years younger so I could have joined the fight-to-be. If I ached for anything, that was it. 

And so, after prayer, the first thought that ran through my angry mind was one of concern, for I knew that governments love to accumulate power and once they have it, they never relinquish it. What will our government do to enhance our security? At first, I dismissed those concerns and naively believed government agencies responsible for our security would take proper and wise steps to protect our nation from future attacks. Again, unlike the headline writer, I definitely was not willing to trade my constitutional rights, my civil liberties, for a bit more security. In fact, drastic security measures were about the last thing on my mind. I had hoped we would learn from the one democratic nation that had been the most successful in preventing terrorist hijackings, the nation of Israel. Israel’s approach was personal; that is, it focused on the person more than the stuff. They didn’t ignore the contents of baggage and personal belongings, but they turned their attention primarily to the person. They had discovered that terrorists often had obvious, predictable traits, that potential terrorists could be identified before they boarded an aircraft. But instead, President Bush created another pair of unwieldy bureaucracies, the Department of Homeland Security and the TSA, and along with his successor and an agreeable Congress, resorted to extreme but not always the most effective means to increase security. In this effort we often use blatantly unconstitutional, and often quite foolish, approaches to security. Today the elites who burden the nation’s citizens with authoritarian rules avoid them by flying in government or private aircraft. I, too, avoid commercial air travel whenever possible, but since I lack the means, I must drive. I simply refuse to subject myself and Dear Diane to the folly of present day aviation security…like the time a TSA employee revealed that I was singled out for more intensive search because I wore a cross on my lapel.

And today, we look to Afghanistan, where all this began twenty years ago, and for reasons we can blame only on ourselves, nothing has changed.

Pray for our nation.