By Courtney Hong
Staff Writer
It’s been two years since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. After all this time, the United States seems to have something to show for the thousands of lives lost. It’s not nearly enough.
During the past year, the Bush administration has still been asking what went wrong. In July, Bush stated, “my administration has transformed our government to pursue terrorists and prevent terrorist attacks.”
At the same time, there have been continual attempts by that administration to deter the efforts of the nonpartisan 9/11 Independent Commission, created to bring intelligence failures to light.
Tangible progress is absent when leaders fail to be held accountable for their shortcomings.
What’s more, much recent hype has surrounded the surfacing of rare video footage of the initial strikes. This footage provides a different, but nonetheless superficial, perspective on the tragedy.
No matter how many different physical angles there are, what happened is still bigger than what meets the eye, and is about more than just the bruised ego of the mightiest nation in the world.
It’s not enough that organizations like the Coalition of 9/11 Families have been lobbying since June for the preservation of the WTC site as a national memorial. It’s not enough that today, there is a commemoration ceremony being held on site to remember the lives lost.
What’s missing, and has been missing, in this fragmented picture of the Sept. 11 aftermath is God.
This is not meant to be a battle that belongs only to those personally affected by the attacks. We should not be content with giving sympathy from the sidelines. We are called to share in each other’s sufferings, even if it’s merely through prayer.
Abraham Lincoln once said, “We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven…. But we have forgotten God.”
More than a century later, this still rings true as Americans continue to believe that what makes a nation great is what man has been able to build.
The phrases, “United We Stand” and “God Bless America” covered ground across the nation in the year following the attacks.
Just like other temporary promotions, they lacked the substance to stay standing.
We can’t unite if we depend on our fluctuating hearts to force us to care about issues that don’t directly involve us.
We can’t ask God to bless us when he is too often the farthest focus from our hearts.
What happened two years ago is bigger than we choose to comprehend. We can keep trying to pick up the pieces of tragedy and attempt to fashion yet another underpinning of fool’s gold that proclaims the power of man.
Or, we can see that we were never meant to be radically transformed by our own efforts, that there’s a God still waiting to build us fully upon a foundation of pure, refined gold for his glory.
According to 1 Samuel 2:30, God will honor those who honor him. He promises that if we humble ourselves and pray, he will heal our land.
The thousands of lives cannot have been lost in vain.
September 11, 2003