9.9.11

Fear Not!

Everyone else is doing it.  Might as well jump on the bandwagon.  Remembrances of, thoughts about, lives changed by 9/11.

To begin, a friend and former co-worker was in a meeting at the Pentagon that fateful morning.  My firefighter neighbors confirmed that he probably didn't know what was happening and that he didn't suffer.

My city has received renewed threats on this anniversary.  The police and other security officials near my office have stepped up their presence.  A current co-worker doesn't want to be within 200 miles of here this weekend.  Not being able to decamp to our home state, she has promised her mother not to leave her apartment at all this weekend.

Yet, I'm not afraid. 

Fear won't prevent me from going to the mall, or the grocery store, or the pub to watch football.  I am more terrified of driving on the interstate in a deluge of a rainstorm than I am of being targetted by a terrorist.  I'm more fearful of dying of cancer than of dying at the hands of some vengeful zealot hellbent on driving a figuative stake through our collective capitalist hearts.

They didn't do their job.  If they were successful terrorists, they would have filled me with terror.  They didn't.  They didn't defeat me.  Like a child who tells the monster under the bed that he is no longer afraid of it because it's not real, I have told the monster in the fertilizer-and-fuel-oil-packed rental truck that I am not afraid of him.  He may kill my body, but never my spirit.

Because I am not afraid.

[Title taken from this.]

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