BlakeAtwood.com

I’m sure it’s a sign of my generation that I first received notice of the tragedy of 9/11 through a campus-wide email while still in college. I was used to receiving strange mass emails from students I’d never met. Usually it would start a flame war that was always intriguing to me, especially if it meant less time writing the paper I should have been working on. I thought the email was some sick prank.

Then I turned the TV on and the world changed.

A few weeks after the attacks, I wrote the following. How far have we come?

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Words have the power to create and the power to destroy.
Words helped to create the Tower of Babel.
Words helped to destroy the World Trade Towers.

The Bible says the earth’s inhabitants once possessed a unified language. Such a united humanity was able to accomplish such a momentous task, to build a Tower to the Heavens. Even God got scared. “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. (NIV).” You can check that story out in Genesis 11:1-9.

You know too well the other story.

I just wish it was a movie, “reel” life, and not real life.
A plane,
buildings crumbling,
people dying,
mourning,
weeping,
praying,
uniting,
caring,
giving,
hoping,
living.

Words destroyed the towers.
Words repeated so often they became meaningless mantras.
Words used to infect the minds of religious zealots.
Words used to turn “civilians, women, and children” into “targets.”
Words that turned “suicide” into “glorious martyrdom.”
Words that turned “hatred” into “piety.”
Words that would not bear their bad seed until the awful morning of September 11th, 2001.

But words will help to create a new America, one much, much more aware of itself in the global scene. One hopefully more aware of other atrocities in other countries in the global scene.

This new America is beginning to understand words long forgotten. We’re beginning to regain a sense of national pride. We’re beginning to have the same definitions for what we call “freedom” and “justice.”

We’re beginning to speak the same language.

Is God afraid?

I don’t think so. I believe He knows what He’s doing, as hard as that is for me to grasp, or even want to grasp at a time like this.

But if I weren’t God, and I were a part of the group responsible for these atrocities, I’d be scared to death. Literally.

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To all the families and friends that still have to live with the memories of what could have been, who involuntarily gave up what they loved most, we will never forget their sacrifice, your sacrifice.

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