Here we are again. This time though it is the 5th anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks by Al Queda on our powerful country. I was at work like many Americans on the East Coast on the morning. I was fortunate to have internet access at work, and I remember a colleague coming to my desk and saying that the World Trade Center just got attacked. I quickly turned to the news websites and saw the first images. Then a few minutes later, the news internet website were so flooded with traffic, that for the first time that I could remember a top website like CNN.com had a ’server busy’ message on their website!
My wife and 3 month old daughter were in Caifornia visiting her parents at the time, so I immediately called her (it was almost 6am in California at the time) and I woke her out of her sleep and told her to look at the news which my father-in-law was already looking at in amazement. Of course, she could not believe it, nor could I. Was this World War 3?
Needless to say. Obviously it wasnt. Or at least not on the scale that we consider a World War. This is more than a war. It is a ‘terrorism’ war. Since then radical Islamic radicals have attached Spain, England, and other countries as a way to spread their terror.
I just got an instant message from an ethnic Romanian-American youth that is serving in Iraq. He messaged me from Germany where he has been recovering from a bomb that hit his Humvee while patroling the streets of Iraq on Sept. 2nd. Thankfully, he is doing better and recovering, but it really hit home the fact that though most of us are sitting in the comfort of our home. The shadows of Sept. 11 are real and still burning for the past 5 years.
Is this date just a tradition?
I read an article in the Sept 11, 2006 edition of Time magazine of how the next generation 30 years from now will look on the ‘War on Terrorism’ and the impact 9 - 11 had on our country and world picture. Most people will see it as the Pearl Harbor of our generation. Until then though, how many lives will be lost on both sides?
God help us be prepared at all times.
