20 Years Ago

Twenty years ago the world became a different place then the one I'd always known. I was only ten but I still remember it vividly. I remember the shock and horror as planes full of people were used as weapons of mass destruction and flown into buildings full of more unsuspecting people who had just show up for what they thought would be a normal Tuesday morning at work. I remember the normal, everyday people that weren't going to let others suffer so they chose to fight back, even knowing it meant sacrificing themselves by crashing into a Pennsylvania field to prevent their plane from being used as another weapon. 

I remember the firefighters who ran up those flights of stairs to get people out. I remember the first responders and volunteers who spent months and months searching through the rubble, looking for survivors and wanting to help families find closures. I also remember the terror that continued to plague our nation for weeks, months and even years after that tragic day. I remember thousands of people flooding into churches all across the nation as an awakening swept across our land. 

There were horrible, unimaginable tragedies that took place on 9/11/2001. There were horrible things that happened afterwards. I won't deny that. There were also millions of inspirational moments, stories, songs, art, and acts of heroism that came in the aftermath. 

You know what else there was? What I most remember? A promise. 

"We will never forget."

That was an echo that rang across the land for months to come. It was spoken by almost every person I knew, half the cars that you passed on the roads had the bumper sticker, business had signs and everyone with a platform repeated the same mantra, over and over again. "We will never forget."

As our brave men and young women gave up the dreams they'd been pursuing and raced to the recruiting offices to sign up to serve our country we repeated that promise. We turned out in the streets to show our support of them. We prayed for their swift and safe return. We hung up their pictures to show our pride of the sacrifices they were willing to make.

America was angry. We had been blindsided and innocent people had been made more then just victims, they were made the unwilling weapons of evil, radicalized terrorists who were hell-bent on causing pain, terror and destruction. We were willing to do whatever it took to fight back and reclaim our nation, to make sure that something like this never happened again. And we promised all of those victims the same promise.

We will never forget.

Now here we are 20 years later. And I have one very simple question for you. Have you forgotten?