I still find it hard to remember the day the towers fell.  America was so wounded, so hurt.  We wept, openly, shamelessly, even as the rage built.  For a brief time we became what we had not been for some time, and are not now: one people, one nation, sorrowing but determined.  Over the years the details that were so poignant at the time have slowly been erased from national memory.  I hold this to be a great loss.

Memory is the foundation of identity.  We are, ultimately, who and what has been transmitted to us from the past; family, nation, culture.  We live in an age in which those treasures are being stripped from our collective memory, rendering us incapable of passing our identity to the future, our legacy, our their inheritance.

For me, your Irascible Correspondent, three images stand out.

The first is the medical responders, nurses, doctors, EMTs standing behind their ambulances, gurneys at the ready, waiting to receive the waves of wounded that never came.  So few came.  So pitifully few.
The second are the leapers.  Men and women whose situation inside the burning towers was so intolerable, so desperate, so hopeless that they chose to fall to their deaths rather than endure another second of their agony.  So many, so many.  LORD have mercy.  Christ have mercy.  LORD have mercy.
Then there were the boats.  500,000 people evacuated from Manhattan Island in a single day, the largest waterborne evacuation in history.  Completely spontaneous – the boat lift was underway well before the Coast Guard radioed a call for help – completely unorganized (but not chaotic) hundreds of boats of all kinds got underway for the Battery, the southern shore of Manhattan Island.  It was a volunteer, self organizing response to a desperate need, rescuing half a million people, delivering them to safety on the shores of New Jersey and Brooklyn. 

This was an example of America at her best. This is American greatness.  This is who we are as a nation and as a people.

Never forget.