Guest Column

We must not forget Sept. 11, 2001

By MARY PARTINGTON, Guest Columnist
Published September 11, 2007

The colors are almost gone. The red and blue are blending with the white, but you can still make out the stars and the stripes. The little flag sticker on the back window of our car is there as a reminder of the event we promised never to forget.

Back when we still had Eckerd drugstores, if you made a donation in the days after Sept. 11, 2001, the stores gave you flag stickers. I went to two or three stores before I found one with a supply. I wanted to display my support of our country. In the days after 9/11, we rushed to show we were united, we were Americans.

Flags were everywhere, and we wore red, white and blue to show our support and our grief. We bought flags for our homes and our cars and wore lapel pin flags on our clothes. Remember the flag-wavers greeting the men and women going to and from MacDill Air Force Base? Firefighters and police were recognized and saluted throughout our country and given free admission to the theme parks. Firefighters of New York were honored and saluted in parades and ballparks. The nation was overwhelmed at the self-sacrifice of so many brave civil servants.

I can tell you exactly where I was on Sept. 11, 2001. I can also tell you exactly where I was when the news reported that President John F. Kennedy had been shot on Nov. 22, 1963. Then a stream of deaths followed and I can tell you exactly where I was when the news of the deaths of the Rev. Martin Luther King and then Bobby Kennedy were broadcast in 1968. I know where I was when the news of the death of Princess Diana was released. There were other deaths and there were riots, cities burning, terrorists striking during the 1972 Olympics, and who could forget the Oklahoma City bombing.

These were horrific events involving people who did not deserve to die in the manner they did. But my reaction was different with 9/11. I felt sorrow and outrage as I did with the past tragedies but a thought kept repeating itself in my mind after 9/11: "We must not forget."

I was very sure this tragedy would fade in the memories of most Americans - to save our sanity we would not continue to dwell on the event. Now we are looking at the sixth anniversary and we shrug our shoulders and say a prayer in remembrance. The thought still runs through my mind, "we must not forget."

Our soldiers are in foreign countries fighting, trying to bring peace in lands that do not understand our meaning of peace.

Again, I am taken back to the time when the world watched another war, the Vietnam War. We watched as planes filled with refugees took off as we made our hasty exit. We treated the returning soldiers with contempt and scorn. The feeling of shame for our treatment of the military still haunts me. Men and women who served during that conflict still bear the scars that we, not the enemy, inflicted upon them.

It is said that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. As painful as it is, we must never forget how we felt on Sept. 11, 2001, not how we feel on Sept. 11, 2007.

We must never forget.

Mary Partington lives in New Port Richey.

[Last modified September 10, 2007, 21:18:48]