For The Powers Of Heaven Shall Be Shaken

A photo of New York firefighter Edward James Day is placed on his name at the 9/11 memorial reflecting pool. Photo credit:  Kena Betancur/AFP/Getty Images

I spent the day yesterday wiping my eyes and grinding my teeth as I sifted through photographs of the heartbreaking swiftness and cruelty of 9/11. Sixteen years have passed and the sorrow still runs deep.

Thousands of 9/11 victims' relatives, survivors, rescuers and others are expected to gather today at the World Trade Center to remember the deadliest terror attack on American soil. 

“A solitary candle, a flag, a tear, these are the tokens of our renewal,” was how Tony Snow began his “Parting Thoughts” segment on Fox News Sunday on September 16, 2001.

He barely made it through while reading the words he had written down in the minutes before the show aired that day:

"The United States had a spirit before it had a name─one of faith and freedom, of ambition tempered by piety. We once were a nation of neighbors and friends, we are again today. We once were a nation of hardship-tested dreamers─we are again today. We once were a nation under God─and we are again today. Our enemies attacked one nation, they will encounter another, for they underestimated us. Today in our grief and in our rage, our determination and hope, we've summoned what's best and noblest in us. We are again Americans."

Are we Americans again?

A decade and a half later a horde of savages spread around the world and skulking here among us are still bent on our destruction.

Hate-filled celebrities used their Twitter accounts to compose death wishes for supporters of President Trump during hurricanes Harvey and Irma.  Democrats of every stripe hang by a fraying thread of hope they can successfully impeach the man who embarrassed their party and utterly humiliated their deeply flawed and corrupt candidate for president.

During Irma’s destruction, looters ransacked evacuated homes and businesses.  For weeks before the arrival of the cataclysmic weather that struck Texas and Florida we’ve seen extremists trying to destroy America from within.

Today we are concerned with remembering our darkest day and we will weep for what was taken from us.  Tomorrow we will move on. 

But what are we moving towards?  America is being destroyed from within as much as from without. What the nation has become, through death by fire, bravado, war, forgetfulness, treason, and vulgar asininity could not have been prophesied on September 10th, 2001.

We will never be able to undo the pain of that day or the barbarity that is unequaled in our history.  I will lower Old Glory to half-staff at sunrise and raise her again at sunset as a tribute to those whose names were added to The Lamb’s Book of Life and pray for a more gracious and civilized America.  

The Spirit Of America

Photo credit:  Ethan Miller/Las Vegas Sun

Edmund Burke once said, “He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill.  Our antagonist is our helper.”  Burke lived during the 18th Century and is remembered primarily for his support of the cause of the American Revolutionary War and the thirteen colonies that were struggling to break free of the British Empire.

Today, America wrestles with the filthy heresy of Islam and the Muslims who wish to do us harm.

On September 12, 2001 the spirit of America awoke from its slumber.  The American flag began to fly everywhere we looked to show defiance against the terrorists.  The sight of Old Glory was a rallying cry for a wounded nation.

NBC’s Tom Brokaw commented, “Almost as soon as the Twin Towers came down the flags went up.  They began to grow in every crevice of America.  Someone said the sight of them is like countless bandages of patriotism covering a nation’s wounds.”

Around 5:00 PM on September 11, 2001 Daniel Williams, a NYFD firefighter saw the American flag attached to a yacht that was docked on the Hudson River and grabbed it. On his walk back to Ground Zero, Williams was joined by fellow firefighters George Johnson and William “Billy” Eisengrein.  The three spotted a flagpole about 20 feet above street level and climbed up to raise the flag as photographer Thomas E. Franklin captured the image.

The image captured by Franklin, a staff photographer for The Record in Bergen County, N.J., was quickly picked up by national newspapers, magazines and television networks. Many felt it was reminiscent of Joe Rosenthal’s imageof the Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima during World War II.

A picture that was snapped on September 12, 2001 by Las Vegas Sun photographer Ethan Miller captured the image of a little 3-year-old girl sitting on her dad’s shoulders at a candlelight vigil at the Thomas & Mack Center.  Miller struggled to get the picture he knew would be “special.”

"There was that one moment when she lifted her other hand and then the flag unfurled—I got one frame off as she did that, and that was the photo. The little girl looked up at the same time that she raised her hand and her eyes caught the light.  All of these sad adults were around her, and she looked so innocent" as she lifted her eyes skyward as if “beseeching the help of a higher power,” said Miller.

The hope of a nation was captured in that moment.  The picture of little Alana Milawski is without a doubt my favorite iconic image of September 11th.

We don’t see flags flying from porches or lining the streets of America like we did 13 years ago.  Seeing that picture again has inspired me to do something I should have done years ago. Tomorrow I will buy a 20-foot in-ground flagpole complete with eagle ornament.  I’ve already called my handyman to arrange for its installation. 

Maybe I can inspire my neighbors to fly Old Glory too.  I think I’ll visit my neighborhood Walmart and purchase a handful of flag pole sets and pass them out.  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the demand for flags would soar again to bolster a nation’s morale and the sight of flags once again began to grow in every crevice of America?

The Day The Earth Was Soaked With Tears

I uploaded this video four years ago in support of Project 2996.  Remembering 9/11 is gut-wrenching.  My heart is filled with sorrow.  The tears flow seemingly without end.  The memories are just as vivid today as they were thirteen years ago.

Every day that I pulled into the parking lot at work, before I turned off the ignition to my car, I would replay in my mind the searing images of the people clinging to the broken windows of the World Trade Center and the doomed souls who chose to leap to their death rather than burn up in the inferno that raged all around them.  They chose to leap into The Father’s arms. Those images were a reminder of why I was in that parking lot.

I am retired now.  No longer am I with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.  I will weep today as I have every year since that ungodly day when the sky was crystal clear blue and the Earth became soaked with tears.

The names of those who perished that day became a poem and the names became a chant and the names became a prayer.

I will never forget.

I Still Remember

In one his finest pieces, Gerard Vanderleun expresses so forcefully what I, and countless other Americans, feel this morning:

[SNIP]

We were soon to know the nature of the new hell and we were all thrust into it without repeal. The days turned to months and the months turned to years and now we have turned around and a decade is gone. What might have been ours, for good or ill, in that decade was forever stolen from us. Stolen from us not—never doubt this—by one man alone, but by a host of savages and throwbacks spread around the world and here among us and dedicated to our destruction. A host that will use any means necessary to destroy this nation while this nation "serves justice" up in spoonfuls and creates "Rules of Engagement" with which to hamper those who would defend it with their very lives. 

What the nation has become, through death by fire, bravado, war, forgetfulness, treason, and blunt stupidity could not have been foretold on September 10, but here we are—a lurching ship of state captained by a malicious hater of the American soil. That same captain, maddened by his own stunted heritage, will today disgrace the soil of Ground Zero. It is a difficult reality that has been dealt by the hands of fate; one that is still being played out.

[SNIP]

Now over a decade has passed, "a low dishonest decade," since the day after September 10 and the thing that looked like a man, the monster that set the events of the 11th in motion, has been expunged from the Book of Life. Too easily and too quickly for my tastes but my tastes in these matters are rooted in Scots' blood, and that blood demands punishments too severe to write down here or to hold in the mind for long. 

Some would say that his death with a bullet to the brain and then the use of the body as food for crabs and worm on the bottom of the ocean means "Debt paid" and "War over" and "Victory." Let that be to them as it will be, but my blood says that it is not paid, not over and not a victory. 

My blood says that all of those in his line need to be expunged, and that all of those who emulate and revere his manner of thinking need to be expunged, and all of those in his part of the gene pool need to be drained away and destroyed, root and branch. My blood says, "Carthago delenda est." 

From what little I know of history, what little I know of our enemies, I know in the marrow of my bones that there will come a terrible day in which that final judgment will be rendered and that final act shall be done. And as it was on the day after September 10, I remain relentlessly for this reckoning; a reckoning that is still to come, but like September 11 itself, certain to arrive.

We stood aghast at the horror before us.  Twelve years on, the memory still sears the soul; ushers forth great tears and sorrow.  One announcer covering the news said, “America, offer a prayer.”

It was against that background of works and days that the doors of history swung open and we all walked through them forgetting to ask, "What fresh hell is this?"

It’s Been 4,015 Days

In the National September 11 Memorial and Museum there is an artifact that, for me, speaks volumes about America’s past, present and future. 

During the recovery phase at Ground Zero, a New York firefighter found an open Bible that had been fused into a piece of metal from the World Trade Center.

As Alexis de Tocqueville observed of 19th century Americans, “The Americans combine the notions of religion and liberty so intimately in their minds that it is impossible to make them conceive of one without the other.”

How could it be otherwise?  It is imbedded in our founding documents.  “We hold these Truths to be self-evident …” served as a striking rebuttal both to the idea of the divine right of kings and the notion that our rights are dispensed by government.

Instead we have, “All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

From these founding principles arose the most benevolent superpower in history.  It has been to the benefit of Christians and non-Christians alike across the globe that America was founded as, and remains, a country rooted in Judeo-Christian values and ideals.

From the Bible, in Daniel 3:18-27, we are told of the blind rage of King Nebuchadnezzar when he learned that three Hebrews named Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego would not bow to the golden statue he had made in his image.

He ordered them to be thrown, bound tightly in all their clothing into a fiery furnace, to be executed.

To make sure the job was carried out as he had ordered Nebuchadnezzar came to the furnace and was shocked to see four men inside the flames walking around. In his astonishment he asked those with him if they had cast three men into the fire and they answered that truly only three men were cast into the fire. Nebuchadnezzar then exclaimed that he saw four, not three men walking around in the fire.

Stunned by what he was witnessing, the king came near to the mouth of the furnace and called to the Hebrews to come out of the fire. The miracle was unmistaken and Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego walked out of the flames untouched by the fire. The Bible says not even one hair on their heads was harmed and their clothes were unaffected and there was not even the smell of smoke on them.

How is it that the Bible found by the firefighter was fused into the white hot metal of the World Trade Center and yet you can easily read the exposed, unburned page?

You may be wondering why  I have focused on the religiosity of the found Bible.

We now know that the aircraft which crashed into the first tower of the World Trade Center was traveling at a speed of approximately 586 miles per hour—its fuel tanks filled with 10,000 gallons of jet fuel.  Twelve weeks after the terrorist atrocity there was at least one fire still burning in the rubble making it the longest burning structural fire in history. 

Logically, that Bible should have been incinerated, but it wasn’t.  It belonged to someone who worked in the World Trade Center and is a testament to his/her faith—and to our nation’s faith.

By contrast, as Daniel Greenfield writes in Towers in Twilight, “For Islam, the game is strictly zero sum. If American civilization thrives, then their civilization is shadowed. If people are happy here, then their own happiness is marred. If there are two towers in New York City, then that takes away from the glory of their civilization. Islam is the bitter beggar forever looking to steal what it cannot have, worrying over the imaginary history of its own greatness and cursing the upstarts in the streets of a foreign city for taking what was rightfully theirs.” [Emphasis mine.]

Greenfield continues, “The American who shares his good fortune with the rest of the world cannot understand that there are some people who would rather steal than accept a gift, who would rather destroy than build and who would rather drown the world in darkness than accept someone else's light. With difficulty he might accept the existence of a small number of people who think this way, but the notion of a civilization built in this mold is too obscene an idea for him to accept.”

It has been widely reported that this year's remembrance of 9-11 is subdued. Thousands had attended the ceremony in New York in previous years, including last year's milestone 10th anniversary. About 1,000 gathered by Tuesday morning, making paper rubbings of their loved ones' names etched onto the Sept. 11 memorial.

Commuters rushed out of the subway and fewer police barricades were in place than in past years in the lower Manhattan neighborhood surrounding Ground Zero. On Tuesday, much of downtown Manhattan bustled like a regular weekday, except for clusters of police and emergency vehicles on the borders of the site.

This  day evokes a torrent of tears in me.  It is heartbreaking to realize that a nation that had been bathed in innocence in 2001 became, and still is, the target of the bitter beggars to which Mr. Greenfield so adroitly referred.

Never forget.

2011 The NFL Remembers 9/11

The Most Searing Event Of My Life

Sunday will mark the tenth anniversary of 9/11—a day of unspeakable horror and unparalleled heroism.

The day was clear and bright—a beautiful blue sky draped the city that never sleeps.  By mid-morning, the Manhattan skyline became shrouded in smoke.

We now know that the aircraft which crashed into the first tower of the World Trade Center was traveling at a speed of approximately 586 miles per hour—its fuel tanks filled with 10,000 gallons of jet fuel.  Twelve weeks after the terrorist atrocity there was at least one fire still burning in the rubble making it the longest burning structural fire in history.  We never, before that day, thought of passenger planes as weapons.

There is still an ache in my heart ten years after and tears are streaming down my face as I write these words.

Tom Brokaw commented, “Almost as soon as the Twin Towers came down the flags went up.  They began to grow in every crevice of America.  Someone said the sight of them is like countless bandages of patriotism covering a nation’s wounds.”

One of the iconic photographs that emerged was that of a small blonde-haired girl atop her father’s shoulders at a candlelight vigil; her right arm outstretched holding a small American flag.

The television networks had small images, called “bugs”, of the flag superimposed on the screen for weeks after the attacks.  Fox News maintained that image for many months after all the others discontinued its use.

Part of the fourth stanza of “America The Beautiful” reads:  “O beautiful for patriot dream, that sees beyond the years.  Thine alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears.”  Dan Rather wept on the David Letterman show as he recited these words.  He noted, “We can never sing that song again the same way.”

Peggy Noonan writing for the Wall Street Journal noted, “When you ask New Yorkers now what they remember, they start with something big—the first news report, the phone call in which someone said, ‘Turn on the TV.’ But then they go to the kind of small thing that when you first saw it you had no idea it would stay in your mind forever. The look on the face of a young Asian woman on Sixth Avenue in the 20s, as she looked upward. The votive candles on the street and the spontaneous shrines that popped up, the pictures of saints. The Xeroxed signs that covered every street pole downtown. A man or a woman in a family picture from a wedding or a birthday or bar mitzvah. ‘Have you seen Carla? Last seen Tuesday morning in Windows on the World.’”

She continues, “They tell us to get over it, they say to move on, and they mean it well: We can't bring an air of tragedy into the future. But I will never get over it. To get over it is to get over the guy who stayed behind on a high floor with his friend who was in a wheelchair. To get over it is to get over the woman by herself with the sign in the darkness: ‘America You Are Not Alone.’ To get over it is to get over the guys who ran into the fire and not away from the fire.”

“You've got to be loyal to pain sometimes to be loyal to the glory that came out of it.”

E. J Dionne, in a September 7, 2011 screed for the Washington Post, suggests it is time to leave 9/11 behind.  "After we honor the 10th anniversary of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, we need to leave the day behind. Al-Qaeda is a dangerous enemy. But our country and the world were never threatened by the caliphate of its mad fantasies."

From the men and women who began that dreadful Tuesday morning sitting at their desk or in an airport to the brave passengers on Flight 93 who defied their murderers to prevent the murder of others on the ground to the rescuers who stared death in the face, we will weep and offer our deepest sympathy.  To the children, spouses and friends of those who left them that day we say you are not alone.

On Sunday, September 16, 2001, during a two-hour special presentation of Fox News Sunday, Tony Snow offered a moving commentary:

"Good and evil almost never express themselves as harshly and clearly as they did Tuesday morning. People we don't know slaughtered people we do and they did it with contemptuous calm. Yet, even as clouds of dust and smoke rose from the rubble, even as family members tortured by hope and doubt took to the streets with pictures and pleas, even as mobs celebrated in Gaza, Cairo, and Baghdad, something shook itself sluggishly to life and that something is a sense of ourselves.”

“Kindness flourished amid the flames: a couple carried a disabled man down sixty-eight flights of stairs, a priest crouched to give last rites as a mighty tower collapsed, and the hand of God closed about him. A man and woman, their hope gone, held each other and leaped. A solitary candle, a flag, a tear. These are the tokens of our renewal.”

“The United States had a spirit before it had a name; one of faith and freedom, of ambition tempered by piety. We once were a nation of neighbors and friends, we are again today. We once were a nation of hardship-tested dreamers, we are again today. We once were a nation under God and we are again today.”

“Our enemies attacked one nation, they will encounter another. For they underestimated us. Today in our grief and in our rage, our determination and hope, we've summoned what's best and noblest in us; the kinship that awes our enemies and friends alike. We are again Americans."

On October 8, 2001 President Bush addressed the nation.  In his speech he revealed, “I recently received a touching letter that says a lot about the state of America in these difficult times, a letter from a fourth-grade girl with a father in the military.  ‘As much as I don’t want my dad to fight,’ she wrote, ‘I’m willing to give him to you.’ This is a precious gift.  The greatest she could give.  This young girl knows what America is all about.”

For anyone, anyone, to say we must leave 9/11 behind must have a black, cold heart.  I will never forget.  May God bless America today and every day.


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