“September 11, 2001, A date which shall live in infamy….”

If Franklin Delano Roosevelt were alive today, he surely would have described those attacks in the same manner as the attacks on Pearl Harbor sixty years earlier.

I was at work, as many folks were, just plugging along in my mundane daily life. Then word came about the attacks, we tried to pull up the news sites like MSNBC on our PC’s but couldn’t get through…too much traffic at the sites. Finally, we all gathered in the conference room and watched the devastation on a TV. At first I was sort of numb, not really comprehending. It was not until I went home an hour later that I stood, hugging my wife while tears ran down both our cheeks, that it really hit home what exactly had happened.
As the smoke and dust started to clear, the sight of smashed Police and Fire/Rescue equipment was heart wrenching. My heart hurt for the families of the fire and police personnel. My family is a Police family. I was a Policeman for 15 years, and my brother is still a Policeman (and yes, I use the “old” term, I like it). In 1995, I had paid a visit to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial in Washington DC . This is “The Wall” for cops. The name of every law enforcement officer that has ever fallen in the line of duty is engraved there. I remember walking through the monument, looking at the names, wondering who they were, what they were like, if they had families. I then thought of my own four children and wondered how they would cope were I to end up here, on this wall. It was an emotional moment. Those same emotions came flooding back while I watched the scenes unfold on my television on Sept 11, 2001. I thought about the families and the children of all the officers lost in the attacks and thought, “Oh man, “The Wall” is gonna have a lot of names added this year”. Of course, they were many more than Police and Fire and Rescue personnel lost that day. They were many, many ordinary citizens just pluggin along in their mundane daily life, just as I was doing a couple of hundred miles away.

There but for the grace………..