Remembering 9/11, Eight Years On

September 11, 2001 … September 11, 2001 … 9/11.

Just a mention of a date is enough to reopen and expose many tragic and unnecessary memories.

Yes … of course you remember where you were and what you were doing when you heard. I was at a neighborhood restaurant in Elgin, Illinois having breakfast with the woman who would become my wife exactly one week later. I remember the waitress, trying to both refill our drinks (with shaking hands) and tell us what the sharply escalating buzz was about. She knocked a glass of water all over me, but seemed not to notice; her thoughts were elsewhere. The queue grew rapidly at the cash register as people left half-eaten meals to rush home to their TVs and Internet connections.

The official death toll stands at about 2,996. It fluctuates from time to time, and went up by one last year when a man died of lung cancer he developed after being enveloped in dust and debris at Ground Zero. Another life, left early. He was in his early forties.

For me the eight years that have passed went by like a blur. I started my dream job at United barely ten months prior to 9/11. We got married and have four children now. At United I managed to hang on through still-endless furloughs for almost 8 years. In 2008 I became one more of another thousand layoffs that brought United’s employment rolls below 50,000. The company had over 105,000 employees when I started in 2000.

Careers ended; retirements scuttled; pensions lost; families broken; savings emptied; dreams deferred. Eight years after aircraft-as-WMD brought down the Twin Towers, these are the aftershocks (let’s call them terror “ripples”) that are still felt daily in the airline industry and related parts of the economy at large.

The towers have not been replaced, bin Laden is still out there, and fortress America — beset with economic turmoil, political disunity, and civil uncertainty — is still at war, with extremists and with itself.

Today, I visited this memorial web site. I read through many of the short accounts of lives lost, and ran across this one about the youngest victim on United Flight 93:

Deora Bodley (April 8, 1981 – September 11, 2001) was an American student. She grew up in San Diego, California, where she graduated from La Jolla Country Day High School. As a junior at Santa Clara University, she pursued a double major in French and psychology. She volunteered for AIDS education, Special Olympics and America Reads, where she helped children to read.

Bodley died at the age of 20 in the crash of United Airlines Flight 93 during the September 11, 2001 attacks. She is survived by … her mother, Deborah Borza, her sister Murial (10), her step-mother Nancy Mangum-Bodley and her step-sister, Eva Rupp.

Deora left behind a diary with a poem she wrote in 1992 at age 11: “People ask who, what, where, when, why, how. I ask ‘Peace.’”

In her memory, her father co-founded “September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows.” He worked to rebuild schools in Afghanistan until his death in 2005.

That is the right approach. Let us remember 9/11 by first remembering the victims. Let us honor lives cut short by using our own lives to help others who desperately need some ‘Peace.’

Next, we as a nation must vow to never again let ourselves become something worse, for what we’ve suffered. If we do, bin Laden wins. We must unite again, and be “that shining beacon on a hill” for the rest of the world. God bless.