9/11/2012: A Commemoration

9/11 Memorial  *image courtesy of msnbc.com

As I am sure most (if not all) of you know, today is the 11th anniversary since the U.S. was attacked and over 3,000 people lost their lives. I hesitate to use the word “anniversary”, since usually one thinks of an anniversary as a joyous time, but if you were to look up the word itself it is defined on dictionary.com as either: 1. the yearly recurrence of the date of a past event or  2 the celebration or commemoration of such a date.

Without being cynical or political about it, I would hope that we as a nation do take the opportunity not to celebrate on this day, but to reflect on who we are as a country and what our place was and is to be in this world. It is clear that our lives are not the same as they were on September 10, 2011, due to a number of events that have transpired since then, be they terrorist attacks, natural disasters, financial meltdowns, or the election of the first non-white man to represent the face of America.

Again I feel that we should take stock of what it means to be American and to be grateful of the advantages that comes along with that, but we should also be aware of the improvements we as a people need to make, the rifts we need to heal, and the challenges we still face in the realms of the political, racial, sex and gender based...really the list could go on for a while. In short, we should take this day to remember that even though there is a “me” in “America”, we are formally the United States of America, and we are all in this together.