Today is the tenth anniversary of the attacks on September 11, 2001. I was 20 years old and a junior in college. My boyfriend back home at the time worked the night shift, so each morning he would call me as he was getting ready to go to bed and I was getting up for the day. I was sitting in bed chatting with him when his mother came over to his house and told him to turn on the TV and I turned on mine. We watched the tower two burning from where the first airplane had struck it and then, to our horror, we watched in real time as the next plane flew into tower one.
I was living in Santa Fe, many hundreds of miles away from the attacks, and yet everyone was scared. The Los Alamos National Lab, where your dad worked at the time, showed live news coverage of the event. After the second tower was hit, the news said there was a third plane, and that no one knew what the target was. The bosses at his work told people they could go home if they wanted to because people were afraid the lab might be a target.
Classes were canceled for school that day. We had the only all-school assembly of my entire college career. I remember the president of the college telling us that they were setting up a special phone bank for students from New York to call home.
I'm getting a little teary-eyed just typing this. I know it's going to be hard to explain to you when you get older how scary and horrible that day was, and by the time you're really old enough to start to understand, we may be remembering the 20th anniversary, so that's why I wanted to write my thoughts down today.
I think the worst part was not knowing whether or not it was over. The people on the news really didn't have any information beyond what we were seeing, live, through the cameras. There was a third plane, which crashed into the Pentagon, and then a fourth brought down by the passengers who didn't want their plane to be a weapon. We were all just so stunned, so shocked, and so suddenly afraid of what was lurking outside our country that we'd never considered before.
It's been a challenging decade for our country in the years that followed. Our entire perception of the rest of the world has shifted. While your dad and I were not directly affected, it has changed how everyone in this country thinks and acts.
It's easy to say that THEY are evil, that THEY are out to get us, that THEY are all bad and that we are all good. But I think the one main thing I personally took away from this terrible tragedy is something I hope you will learn early in your life: while there may be small amounts of terrible evil in this world, there is always also outstanding good.
There was no nation responsible for the attack on September 11. There was, nominally, an organization which claimed responsibility, but really, it was the evil act of just a few men. In response, some of the things our country did were (quite a bit) less than perfect.
But above it all, there were individuals doing amazing good things. There were the firefighters and police officers who ran into the disaster area to help, when everyone else was running out. There were the passengers who would not allow their plane to be a fourth weapon. There were the thousands of volunteers and workers who tried to rebuild New York. And there are the thousands more who have decided to mark each September 11th by volunteering in their own communities.
When you learn about this event of our history, when you read this as you get older, I don't want you to be afraid of what happened or afraid that it could happen again. We can't live our lives in fear of what might be. All we can do is do what we can to learn from it, and to work toward preventing it, and the biggest thing you and I can do to prevent anything like this from happening again is to learn to practice tolerance. Tolerance is the antidote to fear. Tolerance allows us to seek to understand people who are different from us. We don't have to agree with them; we don't even have to like them. But we do have to grant that they have as much human right as we do to think, act, and believe as they want.
If there is one lesson I hope to teach you as you grow up, my darling, it is that. Be as tolerant as you can and seek to understand those who are different from you. Those skills alone will make you one of the people doing outstanding good.
All my love,
~Mom
"There is no need for temples, no need for complicated philosophies. My brain and my heart are my temples; my philosophy is kindness. If you have a particular faith or religion, that is good. But you can survive without it. Whether one believes in a religion or not, and whether one believes in rebirth or not, there isn't anyone who doesn't appreciate kindness and compassion. Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible." ~Dalai Lama
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