The Undiscovered Country

Remembrances?

Right now the internet is abuzz with personal remembrances of 9/11 twenty years ago.

I’m usually not one who goes with the crowds on any holidays (so-called). Maybe it’s due to my natural tendency to avoid what the majority is doing. Why add my voice to similar voices when it’ll only get lost in the multitude?

After all, my experience that day isn’t much different from most everyone else’s. The shock, the disbelief, the heart-stopping realization that our world isn’t safe and that we had enemies willing to kill themselves in order to kill us.

Yet we also tend to forget when life returns to normal—or at least adapting to incremental changes in our day-to-day lives so adeptly we still call it “normal.”

For instance, twenty years ago, we didn’t have to arrive at the airport a minimum of two hours before the flight for the privilege of figuratively (and sometimes literally) stripping down before stepping foot on a plane. Now it’s simply a part of our “normal.”

We stepped (and often willingly) into a world where everyone is assumed to want to harm others, and we must prove through metal detectors, x-ray machines, and secret courts that we have no such intention.

We’ve decided to distrust others until they prove themselves otherwise. The whole issue with the thing-that-shall-not-be named going on today has taken that distrust even further.

What other freedoms and liberties have we lost or willingly relinquished in the last twenty years and have convinced ourselves we no longer want or need? And how many others will we give up in the next twenty? I honestly shudder to think…