24 Years Later... 9/11... once united, now divided

Every year on Sept 11 I’m reminded of a moment in my life that is simply unforgettable. 

But this morning is the first time in 24 years that it wasn’t the paramount thought on my mind. It’s tough to focus on the tragedy of 9/11 while trying to wrap my mind around an assassination yesterday and a brutal killing just days before. Not to mention the rash of growing political violence in the last year. 

So let’s see how my thoughts play out. 

24 years ago while on active duty I was awakened by the same news coverage that every other American saw. A smoking World Trade Center building. I was actually on leave (vacation) in Los Angeles at the time. Sleeping on my friend’s sofa, his wife woke me up to show me the news. In my drowsy state I actually said, “cool, what movie is that?”. But it wasn’t a movie and then the second plane hit. 

I had already been deployed to the Middle East. I was already a small part of the ongoing conflict on the other side of the world. Now our own planes were being used in a direct assault against us. And I was a member of the Department of Defense responsible for responding to and defending our nation. 

My grandmother was born on Dec 7 and would tell me how Pearl Harbor forever changed her birthday. My sister born Sept 11 now faced the same forever change. I am not certain I understood this before 9/11 and each year this truth grows more and more. 

Today when talking with youth about that day, I understand what my grandmother must have felt like explaining Pearl Harbor to me. There are no words to accurately describe it. Just a humble remembrance of a tragic attack followed by one of the few times in history my country was truly united. I took my wife and daughter to the 9/11 memorial museum in NYC. It was the first time I was able to let her see with her own eyes what we were remembering every year. And it was a flood of memories for me.

Today, 24 years later ‘united’ is the last word I would use to describe us. In 2009 Obama became POTUS. America’s first black president who would finally end the racial and economic divide. Except he did exactly the opposite and by the end of his two terms our nation was more divided than I had ever seen it. Trump stepped in the division grew rapidly. Then Biden stepped in and ramped it up even more. Each POTUS driving a deeper wedge of division into our nation than the previous one. 

Today Trump is back and the wedge is deeper than it’s ever been. So to contrast the unity this nation had with the disunity we have today is striking, to say the least. 

Yesterday a man was assassinated for expressing his thoughts and engaging in open dialogue with anyone who would come to talk with him. I’ve always considered myself well versed in politics, religion and dialogue in those realms. Charlie Kirk, even at his young age could run circles around me. He lived and died by what he believed. He was a true man of principle. He is resting with God now. But his death has robbed a young wife and two young children of their husband and father. 

The response to this man’s murder is both blessed and tragic. I’ve seen people from both sides decry the violence. But the tragic is that there are American’s celebrating and praising the murder of a man. I don’t know what to say about such people besides, you are evil and wretched. 

When I was in the Navy my ship dropped bombs in Iraq. The local news was fed in and it showed the aftermath of our actions. There was no pretending we were innocuously floating in the ocean. I only have to think of it and those images of the direct aftermath of our bombing are clear in my head. They were the enemy, and yet I mourned the tragic end of their lives. But I was on a warship and this is what warships do. 

Charlie Kirk was on a college campus engaging in dialogue peacefully with anyone who would come to talk to him. I have no kind words for anyone who would praise this murder. 

And yet I’m not surprised. Because over and over agains we’ve seen our politician and media defending criminals and murders for political gain. We’ve indoctrinated a generation into believing that what is evil is good and what is good is evil. We are in the midst of the consequences of the divide that was started 16+ years ago and is now mainstream in the lives and minds of so many.  

My political outlook used to be left vs right. But that is no longer true. It’s good vs evil. How dare you call a political side ‘evil’? Because it is. And I say this knowing both friends and family who are on that side of the political spectrum. I would say to them, you need to acknowledge that your party has left you and is now embracing pure evil. 

When the people and political voices I find myself aligned with are the very people I would have argued with 20 years ago; when the voices of reason come from those who were Democrats a second ago; when the most powerful voices in the direction we should be going are led by exDemocrats (Trump, Tusli, The Free Press, WalkAway, JFKjr, Rogan, MK, and countless more); then I know the world is not the same place I was raised in. It’s not the same place that was united 9/11 24 years ago. All of the voices I find myself aligned with today, I absolutely would have been opposed to yesterday. 

Charlie Kirk was a rare exception to this. He was always grounded in faith, truth and conservative principles. He held within him an encyclopedic knowledge that few can grasp or compare to. He was informed by Scripture and by a deep knowledge of history and literature, that most in our nation never begin to understand or learn. His death was tragic for his family, but also for the loss of a voice of reason that has become anathema in today’s world. 

9/11 was a nationally tragic day. Yet it gave me hope in the future. Unfortunately that hope has been short lived. Today, only a generation later we stand divided. We are destroying ourselves from within. We have forgotten the lessons of 9/11. We have forgotten the lessons of the last 60 years. 

When the twin towers fell they left those who didn’t die covered in dust and ash. Everyone still standing had the same dull grey debris covered image. They all looked the same. And they all stood together. They dug in to uncover anyone who might still be alive, because life was precious. Other peoples lives were precious. Humanity mattered that day. 

Today only our own lives are precious. Only the lives politics tells us to care about are precious. Death is to be celebrated if it’s against our political foe or ignored if it’s not politically expedient to talk about. Criminals are victims who must be sheltered and protected. Released over and over again to commit more crime. Homeless are just a normal part of life EVERYWHERE. Their lives don’t matter. How they got there, irrelevant. We hear the cries for compassion and justice, yet we embrace injustice and indifference. 

I grew up just outside of Compton. It was the edge of middle class and poverty. It was the peak of the gang warfare of the 80’s. The race riots of the early 90’s. That world filled with violence, crime and hate, had more compassion than the world I see today. 

Maybe the death of Charlie will be another Turning Point in this nation. Maybe it can unite us once again. I’m not convinced of this. I don’t know if we will ever be able to put back together the divide that has been forced upon us for most of the 21st century. I fear the wedge has already broken our nation beyond the point of repair. I hope I’m wrong. 

“The Lord Bless you and keep you;

The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you;

The Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace”

I pray for God’s mercy upon our nation. I pray the world my children are now entering as young adults is a place turning towards good; towards justice; towards faith; That was the hope of Charlie Kirk. That was his resounding message day after day. I pray that our nation grows in the love of all life, united in this drive for a better future. The hope we found in 9/11 is currently lost, but Lord willing it is not lost forever.  

Where has the writer in me gone?

 

I used to be an avid writer, with a pen and paper no less. I was writing my sister’s college papers in high school, and then typing them up for her because she couldn’t type. I would hand write letters to my friends, to girls I liked, to family far away. I would journal my thoughts (a practice I started when I was 9) in books that no one ever read. In the Navy letter writing was one of the ways to pass the time at sea. When I was dating my wife, we lived 3000 miles apart. Even though we would try to talk daily, we still wrote letters to each other. 

For many years I would engage in political and theological discussions via email or message board. I would research and think, rethink and overthink my positions and thoughts. Countless hours spent digging into subjects to better understand not just what I was thinking but what my opposition was thinking. So, by default reading, was my balance to my writing. 

It was my therapy to just dump my thoughts out onto paper or type them into a word (type) document on my computer (because I’ve been a computer geek since the 1980’s). I didn’t care who read it or if anyone read it. Much like my wife tells me about her artwork, “I do it for me”. 

But as life goes my work life shifted from one of physical activity and troubleshooting to one of constant mental drudgery, planning, organization, political wrestling, and deep analysis. By the time I’d get home each day, the thought of using my mind for anything else was just anathema. And so, I fell out of the habit of writing, of mentally dumping my mind into words. 

In this time of my sabbatical from the expressive writing world, social media began to grow. Suddenly everyone under the sun was ‘writing’ except it wasn’t deep thoughts but soundbites, endless soundbites. 

The last few years I’ve found I have more time to enter the world of writing that once was my fortress of solace. Yet whenever I try, I find myself uninspired, and hit a wall. I feel like I’m trying to sing a ballad in the middle of 10,000 other musicians just screaming into the same stadium. Some of them can actually sing, but most of them are just awful noise. And the reverberation of all of those voices and instruments at once is deafening. 

This is what social media has done to the philosopher in me. It’s silenced me out of frustration and annoyance. I don’t know how to speak into this medium. 

I also used to have grandiose ideas about the world and the potential impact I may or may not have. But I’ve learned that the true impact of my life is in the circle of the lives that God has placed in my path. I’m still entertained by politics, but I no longer see it as important enough for me to dig into and wrestled other with. I still am passionate about God, theology and religion, but again am drawn back to the circle of influence in my life, verses the masses out there who may or may not read the chaotic thoughts of my minds writing.  

Nor do I spend nearly as much time wrestling with these things myself internally (which was a great inspiration for writing). My internal focus is greatly shifted to external. I’ve developed internal complacency, which I’ll admit is not a good idea.

Am I now just a guy who shares the witty anecdotes of others? Is my original thinking gone? Have I lost the knack for converting the chaos of my mind into coherent language?

The world is full of young thought hustlers on social media. Screaming unoriginal thoughts into the void. It’s also full of the absurd. We are inundated with it, and I’m left asking myself, why even try to argue against such ridiculous self-refuting ideas? And yet these ideas, no matter how absurd, linger and grow like fungus on a tree. 

Today I read the following statement:

“Imagine going back to the ’90s and explaining to someone that the big marketing controversy of 2025 was a hot young blonde selling jeans.”

The very notion is beyond irrational and extreme, and yet that’s all I’ve been seeing for days now. 

Yet this defines the other challenge someone like me faces when engaging this world today; The rate at which these maddening arguments come and go is lightspeed. There is no time to even wrap your head around the concepts before it’s gone, and the next rage bate concept is before you. 

I’m accustomed to grabbing hold of ideas and ferreting out the very roots of their existence, which could take hours, days, months or even years. But instead, like in the I LOVE LUCY episode where Ricky puts Lucy on a very strict time schedule, the meal before you is gone before you even have a chance to get the fork into your mouth to taste it. 

Sticking with the LUCY analogy, how does one write a review about a meal that he never even gets to taste? 

In high school I spent the last 2 years as a TA helping my computer science teacher write a computer diary program. Back then computer programming was minutia to the extreme. You had to account for every detail, every connection, every flow path. It was an exercise is extreme attention to detail, to obtain the desired results. It was trial and error exponentially expressed over long periods of time. 

I long for the days of minds that dig into the minutia, rather than pounce on the fleeting ‘rage’ of the moment. I want to teach our youth the glory of developing a deep understanding of something, of achieving expertise, of being so familiar with something that not only can you see the forest through the trees, but you also see the flowers, the vines, the critters and all the fauna sharply and positively. You know intimately and with certainty the knowledge you possess. You hashed through it relentlessly to the point that it becomes just another part of you. You are the Tom Bombadil of your field, one with the forest you dwell in.   

I don’t know if I’ll ever be a prolific writer again. I no longer feel the need to write for myself, and there are few others I feel the need to write for. Or maybe I’m just out of practice and know the work it will take to rekindle the fire of my pen, and I’ve grown lazier in my middle age. It’s one thing to hold in your mind lots of information, it’s quite another to express it with detail. And that’s the crux. I’ve lost the minutia of many of my thought paths, and I don’t know that I’m inclined to put in the work to reclaim that. 

And yet, even in this moment I am smiling at the therapeutic aspects of the release of the chaos of my mind. Maybe a simple return to my 9 year old self and a diary would be a good start.