This morning on Today, Matt Lauer posed this question to the panel of Today's Professionals (which included Paula Abdul standing in for Dr. Nancy), "Is the attention over 911 waning? Have people moved on?"
Umm, wow. How do you move on from the most horrific act of terrorism on U.S. soil in which over 3,000 people died?
I can see the point. It's been eleven years. College freshmen were only in first grade when this happened, and most of them had probably never seen the Twin Towers anyway.
But does that mean that we have forgotten? That we should just move on?
I was not alive when Pearl Harbor happened or when JFK was shot. But I do remember when the space shuttle Challenger exploded, and I definitely remember when 911 happened. As Donny Deutsch said, "It is up to parents and educators to keep the spirit of 911 alive." (That may not be the exact quote, but the idea.)
And Starr Jones was right on when she said, "The families have moved through, but they will never move on."
For those of us who have had something horrible happen to someone we love, we spend so much time trying to move through the tragedy, but we will never forget having lived it. We live it over and over and over.
Every anniversary (or as I like to say, crapiversary), every time something similar happens to someone else, every time we hear a story like our own, we remember.
And we do a pretty good job of making sure that no one else will forget either.
Today, at the site of the Twin Towers, only family members will be allowed to speak.
This month, Pediatric Cancer Awareness month, people like me tell our children's stories over and over.
Even someone like Anna, who lost her son Jack in a tragic drowning, tells her story, fresh and still painful, just a year after his accident.
But what we try to do is not drag people down with our words, but rather lift people up. We try to inspire hope that this crazy, sometimes awful world in which we live is not all bad all the time.
In our attempts to remember, that's something we never want to forget.
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Will you watch any of the 911 coverage today or attend any services?
