If you are 20 years old, you don’t remember Sept. 11, 2001. If you are 30, you might remember wondering why you were watching television in your classroom at 9 a.m. or recall waiting for your parents to take you home from school.
If you are over 40, like me, you remember staring at the television seeing but not fully comprehending images of a smoke plume rising above Manhattan on a picture-perfect September Tuesday.
I spend part of every Sept. 11 thinking of Bill Weems. We weren’t friends; in fact, we didn’t really know each other that well. Our acquaintance was limited to the dozen Sunday evenings in the late 1990s we spent playing tennis through a program run by Barbara Maitland.
Bill owned a forehand that usually guaranteed him victory over me, although I could occasionally serve-and-volley him into a missed return. I remember a gangly guy with kind of wiry hair who, like me, wore a mismatched ensemble of gym shorts and T-shirts onto the court.
In the few times we talked, I learned Bill had a daughter roughly my daughter’s age. On Sept. 11 every year since his death, I have thought about Bill’s daughter and wondered how she remembers him and if she knows how many people care for and respect the lives of the 2,606 people killed in the World Trade Center; the 125 killed at the Pentagon and the 265 people, including Bill, who died in the four airliners seized by terrorists.
The people who conceived and carried out the 9/11 attacks used our freedom, our illusion of invulnerability living on a continent flanked by two oceans and, ultimately, our naivete, to slaughter our fellow citizens and people from other countries who died on that Tuesday.
There are still people intent on repeating 9/11 and it is probably a blessing that we do not know all the measures taken by our government to foil those plots. I once interviewed the Transportation Security Administration head for Logan Airport who assured me that the hard-working people in blue uniforms who direct passengers through airport screening equipment are the last, not the first, defense against terrorism. He declined to tell me the many other measures taken to ensure airport security, but he did say those efforts had snared people conducting reconnaissance probes in preparation for planning an attack.
Complacency, as a good friend reminds me, kills. Like rust, complacency slowly rots away a structure until it is vulnerable to collapse.
We must guard against complacency to avoid a repeat of 9/11 by educating the generation who did not experience the horror and fear that enveloped that Tuesday morning. Let’s do it for Bill and everyone else who is gone but not forgotten.
Thor Jourgensen can be reached at [email protected].