9/11/2011

Ten years ago today the unthinkable happened. The TV has been filled with footage from 9/11 today, much of it I’ve never seen before. It’s a wound in the collective psyche of America that’s healing, but not yet healed.

9/11 meant different things to different people, but most of us can agree that it was a wake up call to the capacity for evil.

But whose evil? It’s easy to point to 9/11 and say that Muslims are violent and Islam is an evil religion, but in actuality Islam is in a state now that Christianity was in only a few centuries ago. The difference being that the violence perpetrated by the followers of Islam have 21st century weaponry.

I won’t pretend that the world would be a perfect place without religion, but it would be a better place. 9/11 was proof positive of the evil that can be perpetrated by those that can manipulate through religion. The most obvious examples come from Islamic terrorists, but we are not all immune to this. Listening to Pat Robertson can easily show you that we’re not that different on this side of the pond. A leader of the free world like Michele Bachmann would make us little different from Iran.

For me, 9/11 was a wake up call to the evil that can be perpetrated in the name of religion. I’m not naïve enough to believe that it’s just Islam though. We are mere footsteps from being the mirror image of the Middle East.

We must step back from the brink. We must not become evil to fight evil. We must be clear on what evil we fight. We must remember who we are as Americans. We must remember what America is about. It’s not God, it’s not Guns, It’s freedom. We are not a Christian nation, we are a nation of the free. We must stop sacrificing our freedom to our fear. We must call for our freedoms to be restored.

Ten years later, we must begin to heal. We must become what we were. We must stop the pointless bickering. We must stop allowing the clowns in Washington to play us like fools.

Each and every one of us must decide who we are. We must determine this absent of propaganda and religion. Once you have decided who you are, you can decide if you really agree with what is being fed to you. When I did this, I didn’t. Who I am is so different from who I was before 9/11, but I’m a better person. I’m finally true to who I am.

You can be too.