City of Angels!

Our memories of New York City are mainly comprised of the many television shows and films that we have watched from the comfort of our home. The city, like all others, is both an ever changing and always changeless being. Yes, cities are beings with a vibrant personality all of their own. Some say that if you have seen one city, you have seen them all. We have never really believed that. To go out on a quiet weekday morning to the Arizona Memorial in Honolulu, Hawaii is not the same as going to San Antonio, Texas to the quiet certitude that is the small mission that saw the lives of almost two hundred individuals deliberately snuffed out on a predawn morning in March of 1836. The dates are etched into so many memories of those who saw and experienced them and their aftermaths. The years claim more and more of the survivors. Those of the massacre of 1836 are long gone and they depend mainly on the rest of us to confront and to carry on the stories of what happened there and at Pearl Harbor, and a hundred other quiet places where those who love freedom more than a life bereft of it paid what has been called the ultimate price to see that it is continued and perpetuated for those who are yet to come. Over in Japan a band of loyal and self sacrificing ordinary Japanese citizens recently stood ready to go into the radioactive horror that is what is left of a part of the nation’s nuclear power grid simply because they felt that their advanced age and a life well spend might have earned them the right to die for the future of their country.

To die for the future of ones country is perhaps the ultimate right among all those that so many do not seem to realize can be bestowed on self. And, just perhaps, we should be asking ourselves individually and collectively as a nation as we commemorate what happened to all of us on this date just eleven short but seemingly eternally long years ago just what it is that the three thousand souls who perished in New York City, Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and at the Pentagon in Washington D.C. might have died for. Those on the airplane over Shanksville knew that if they were going to die that it was to happen while preventing whatever sort of crime that was being committed against them and whoever else that the mindless monsters on the plane were intending to accomplish. All of the others had no luxury of having anything or much control of how they were going to die. Most died instantly of the explosions but others of them ended up having to make some of the most cruel choices about life and death that any Americans have ever been asked to make. On a once quiet Tuesday morning, in New York City, people who might not have never known each other before stared at the horror that had engulfed them and their mates on the upper floors of the twin towers and elected to join hands and jump to certain death rather than burn up in the ghoulish hell that faced them if they did not make that choice. Very few of us get to make the choice of how we are going to die. These souls made that choice and clung to just a few more seconds of life as they plunged to a life taking landing on the hard concrete below. None of them had any idea that when they came to work that morning that these choices would be thrust upon them. In that way they were truly innocent. The only thing that they had been guilty of was living in a democracy that supports a capitalist idea that people far away were determined to destroy and are still determined to do so to this very day.

This piece takes its title from a movie based in California where an angel of death comes too escort to heaven a gentleman whose time on this earth has come to an end. This angel ends up falling in love with a mortal woman who ends up dying in an accident after the angel has decided that he would rather be mortal than sacrifice her love. The angel goes to the top of a large building in Los Angeles and jumps. When he reaches the bottom, he has become mortal and will have to lead a mortals life. Shortly there after, his love dies and he is left to pick up the pieces. We would like to think that those who jumped to their deaths from the twin towers on this date eleven years ago fell into a state of angelhood before they ever reached the ground. And, the best evidence that we have that that had occurred happened on the first anniversary of September eleventh in 2002, just ten years ago, when an enormous and enduring gust of wind came up as they read the names of the victims on the now cleared site where the tragedy had occurred. The wind started at 8:47 A.M. when they rang the first bell commemorating the first attack and persisted all day long until the last name had finished being read. It was one of the most remarkable things that anyone who was there that day had ever seen or experienced in their lives. Many of those there have since passed away themselves. We remember senator Ted Kennedy’s tousled white hair swirling around in that wind.

So, what do we owe these souls who came to an untimely end on this day just eleven years ago? We can make the case that we owe them just as much as we owe anyone else who has died in defense of a nation or an idea--freedom--that has defined us for so long and so well. It is far too easy to forget the prices that have been paid for what so many of us take so much for granted. And, as always in this nation’s history, there are those who are always ready to take those precious rights away from us. Is the idea conceived in a persons mind such as Osama bin Laden that capitalism and its symbols are an evil thing much different than some ideas that we see being put forth by those in our own country today?

Those who died in New York City eleven years ago today comprised a cross section of America. There were multi-millionaires and cooks who fixed their meals for them in a restaurant located with a breathtaking view of New York harbor and the far stretching sea beyond. And, there were those that they left behind. They were gay people, straight people, children and lovers and all that comprises what humanity is made up of and has always been made up of throughout her history. The children are eleven years older than they were and there are survivors of gay relationships who have chosen to remain alone even though the state now gives them the right to wed. You need someone that you truly love in order to wed. Or, at least that is what so many think anyway. There are widows and widowers who remain that way to this very day because they believe in only one love for a lifetime and they will not betray that love for any reason on this earth. There are others who have moved on, picked up the pieces, and begun life anew. They remind us of the character that Tom Hanks played in the film Castaway where he returned to his spouse after five years of being lost when she thought he was dead. When she saw him, she hugged him but explained that she had married again before she told him so poignantly that he would always be the love of her life. To have loved well once perhaps makes it easier, after a time, to love and love well once again.

So many people die for such seemingly dubious reasons and so many lives lie wasted and unexplained by those who might care to love them so. We need to make sure as a nation that does not happen to the three thousand or so lives that ended on this day just eleven short years ago. We need to make a recommitment to both those souls and the nation that they loved and lived in that did not shelter them well enough that beautiful Tuesday that turned into what it has become. This day can become lost in a cacophony of even greater economic and social horrors. Or, it can become a day that we say that we will do better for both those that died and their children and loved ones who remain behind. We have waited far too long to decide to do those very things and the forces of evil have not weakened during that period of time. We were a nation changed on September eleventh, 2001 and what we do with that change is still within our grasp. But, it will not always remain that way!

We remember the day in 1995 that the domestic terrorist Timothy McVey blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City, taking the lives of over 150 souls, including children in a daycare center located on the first floor. That event has been greatly overshadowed by what happened on September eleventh of 2001. There is nothing to keep us from believing that another event so horrific in nature that it is beyond comprehension could happen in the future if we are not diligent. An event like that might cast all of us into the shadows of a sometimes very unforgiving march of history. We do, however, have the tenth anniversary this year of the winds that came too join in the commemorations at the trade center site. To think that those winds were accidental and a mere coincidence is, just perhaps, not to think at all. If there is great evil in our world, there are also those winds. It is up to us which inheritance that we might choose to embrace!

IOVHO,

Regards,

Joe

To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.