By snoadmin
No matter what label one puts on today’s date, whether it’s referred to as 9-11, Sept. 11 or Patriot Day, millions of Americans will commemorate the 7th anniversary of the terrorist attacks that cost nearly 3,000 lives in New York’s World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania.
Some will attend memorial services while others participate in runs, walks and parades. Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain promised to make nice for one day, suspending rhetoric and appearing together at Ground Zero as a sign of national unity.
Sept. 11, 2001 will be indelibly burned into the American psyche. It will appear in history, political science and social studies textbooks for the rest of time. Much would change in our daily lives because of the attacks, including how we travel, how we communicate and how other countries perceive us.
We would suddenly change from being an invincible power to one that was vulnerable. After all, it took only 19 hijackers armed with box cutters to nearly cripple us emotionally, right?
But Sept. 11 has other significant ties to American and world history. None of these are intended to imply conspiracy or to infer any other type of tie other than the date they have in common. While there are other global attachments to the infamous date, we’re offering only a few that have a war and peace theme.
Benjamin Franklin was known for having somewhat of a twisted sense of humor. On Sept. 11, 1773, Franklin didn’t disappoint when he published “Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One” in The Public Adviser.
For Rule No. 19, the cantankerous sage wrote, “Send Armies into their Country under Pretence of protecting the Inhabitants; but instead of garrisoning the Forts on their Frontiers with those Troops, to prevent Incursions, demolish those Forts, and order the Troops into the Heart of the Country, that the Savages may be encouraged to attack the Frontiers, and that the Troops may be protected by the Inhabitants….”
It’s hard to imagine if Franklin was a true visionary or merely a prankster, but the message seems eerie by today’s standards.
On the same date three years later on Staten Island in New York, upstart American colonists aborted a peace conference with the British, signaling that a revolution was inevitable.
In an ironic twist of American fate, Sept. 11, 1941 was the day ground was broken for an unusually shaped, five-sided building that would be the sight of one of the 9-11 attacks. Hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 ripped into the Pentagon 60 years later, claiming 125 lives.
The same day in 1944 proved to be the beginning of the end for Adolf Hitler when the U.S. Army and allied troops crossed the western border of Nazi Germany. Within six months, Hitler would commit suicide, proof of millions of human atrocities committed in concentration camps would be globally recognized and the Nazi regime would submit to unconditional surrender.
But Sept. 11 hasn’t always been a benchmark for military victory. On the same date in 1965, the 1st Cavalry Division of the U.S. Army arrived on the shores of a small country named Vietnam. We all know how that turned out.
And Sept. 11 isn’t only a day remembered for violence and war.
Mahatma Gandhi unleashed his strategy for non-violent resistance in the human rights struggles in India and South Africa. His philosophy of Satyagraha, coined on Sept. 11, 1906 would eventually be embraced and practiced by Martin Luther King, Jr. and other pacifists in the Civil Rights Movement.
In keeping with the peace theme, on Sept. 11, 1978 then-Pres. Jimmy Carter gathered Egypt’s Pres. Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin at a mountain retreat/military compound in Maryland to negotiate calm between the two powers. Seven days later the three men signed the Camp David Peace Accords.
It’s difficult to discern which direction the world’s history will turn in the future, or what part America will play in that eventuality. The wounds of 9-11 will be deeply ingrained in our national consciousness, but it’s up to us whether Sept. 11 is forever commemorated for conflict or peace.
We at the Daily Forty-Niner keep our fingers crossed that one day Sept. 11 will be remembered for the latter.
— Peace.
