That morning, almost 60,000 people woke up, got dressed and went to work in the largest office building in the world. 2,749 of them didn’t survive the day. On September 11, 2001 at 8:48am, the United States of America changed forever. What we thought could never happen here, did. And our sense of security was shattered.
Cindy and I went to see WORLD TRADE CENTER, the new movie by Oliver Stone. It doesn’t make a political statement. You never see the face of a terrorist. What you do see are the heroes, hundreds of them. And you look more intently into the lives of two men who were trapped inside the rubble of the fallen towers.
Thanks to the courage and perseverance of hundreds of rescue workers, 20 people were pulled out of that rubble. John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno were numbers 18 and 19. And this movie tells their stories in a deeply emotional and realistic way. But their survival was only the beginning of an entirely new story filled not just with gratitude and hope but also with pain, anger, and guilt.
This movie shows us a happy ending, two men rescued and reunited with their families. We must remind ourselves that theirs is only a smaller story within a much larger one. We have yet to see the happy ending to the events of that day. We have yet to see the story of the evil men who did this – our enemy – exposing their beliefs, their motives and the emptiness of their souls. We continue to avoid confronting this truth because of some new thought of sensitivity and political correctness.
Regardless of what you think about the war in Iraq, the politics of George W. Bush, or the military leadership of Rumsfeld, none of us should ever forget the events that changed our world on September 11, 2001.