The unity that America saw immediately after 9/11 is now sorely absent it is up to us, as individuals and communities, whether we can get it back. But what is not arbitrary is how we choose to rise from the ashes of sheer destruction.
none could know what history had in store. Someone boards a plane on a Tuesday morning another person has breakfast with family and is late to work a young adult makes her family proud by enlisting in the military a Muslim family immigrates to their new home in the U.S.
We always can and should work to make our communities more inclusive, but we should also be proud that the Berkshires’ neighborly values can embody the best of how our nation should respond to and cope with our darkest hours, whether they were yesterday or 20 years ago.Īmong the devastating elements of events like 9/11, often a striking one is how arbitrarily suffering is distributed in the moments just before and after. Some Muslim-Americans who spoke to The Eagle, though, said that while they still experience that discrimination - particularly while traveling - they feel “valued” and at-home in the Berkshires. The unique burden put on everyday Muslims and Arabs across America after 9/11, from discrimination to targeted hate crimes, is a moral stain unjustifiable by the fears inevitably sparked by mass atrocities like 9/11. In the Berkshires more broadly, it’s heartening to see the kind of unity that should be embraced as a counter to cruel terror that ultimately seeks to divide us. They lost a family member who meant the world to them, and transformed their grief into a lifeline for people they didn’t even know on the other side of the world. Goodrich Memorial Foundation supported several humanitarian projects in Afghanistan, including the creation of a school in Logar Province. They brought high school- and college-aged students to the U.S. In 2004, the Goodriches founded a program to help educate young Afghan people. Peter Goodrich’s family, for instance, saw the anniversary of the terror attacks not just as a time of mourning but a time of service.
But we also owe it to the victims and survivors of that hellish day to recognize our capacities to strive for good in the wake of catastrophe and the points of resilience that buoyed us - and build upon them. We owe it to ourselves as Americans to honestly grapple with the fact that this processing has not always been healthy or fruitful - from jingoistic war-making in theaters like Iraq and Afghanistan to the anti-immigrant and xenophobic sentiments that continue to sustain the worst corners of our politics. We also wrestle with the evolving anguish that still lingers as we look back on 20 years of processing such incalculable grief at a national scale. We honor the veterans and their families whose lives were forever changed by the ensuing war on terror. On this day, we solemnly mourn the thousands of lives senselessly lost - including courageous first responders who ran toward unimaginable danger to help others - in a terror attack that pierced the heart of our country like no other in its history.
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