Thank you very much for sharing your stories here.

Valerie, I respectfully but vehemently disagree with you. We’ve already sacrificed far too much in the way of civil liberties to the moron in the White House. What I will never, ever do is to give up my right to disagree with the government and to say so publicly, irrespectiv eof what the Islamo-fascists think.

Eric

Years ago I was touring Antietam and I met a NYC firefighter. He was using his vacation to hit as many Civil War sites as he could, riding place to place on his motorcycle. In the tower at Bloody Lane we talked about the heroism of the soldiers. Ive often wondered where he was five years ago yesterday. He struck me as the type of man who would have walked right in.

I was able to get through to my sister who lives on the Brooklyn waterfront across from lower Manhattan. Her husband was supposed to be at the WTC later in the morning and her son attended Stuyvesant High School, just a few blocks away. She couldn’t reach either one of them and had personally seen the second plane hit. “Tense” doesn’t describe the feelings until we learned (much later in the day) that they were both safe. The next day her neighborhood was blanketed by ash and debris. She found a charred page of an airline inflight magazine on her sidewalk.

I’ve been to NYC several times in the past 5 years but still cannot bring myself to visit “ground zero”. Battery Park is as close as I’ve been able to go and from there the feeling is actually palatable. The conspicuous empty space in the Manhattan skyline enrages me as much today as it did 5 years ago.

I can never forget that day and can never forgive those responsible. We should stop at nothing less than hunting them down and exterminating them. NEVER allow the memory of the events of 9-11 to mellow.

I was attending Penn State at the time. I had just gotten out of gym of all things and I went to Pollock Commons to get breakfast, which is really strange because I think in the 3 years I was there I ate breakfast maybe three or four times at most. I’ve always wondered what made me go there that day. Pollock is close to the football training facility so it was me, maybe 2 or 3 others and a few football players watching the T.V. It was a beautiful day outside too. I went straight back to my room and, as everyone seems to have done, I called my entire family, one after the other. I was on the phone with my sister Linda when the 1st Tower went down and I swore up and down. But then Lin started to cry and we then helped each other calm down. And I was really angry too. I took a shower while flight 93 was still in the air and then went to the student center (the HUB) for most of the day to be around people. It was tough in there. They had rolled out TVs and a lot of people were crying but it was a community feeling all around the campus that day and it was a cool feeling. I made it a point to go to my 4pm class, which was American Military History. The prof. was Carol Reardon. She got up and was all fiesty, shaking her head, saying something like they don’t know who they picked a fight with. There were quite a few military men and women in that class too and they were grim, they knew what they would be doing soon. I remember everyone having a hard time using their cell phones too, pretty much all day. well, I’ve vented enough, I just wanted to give my story of that day. Brian

Fortunately for New York, the Governor, George Pataki, nationalized the State’s Guard so that it could be brought into the City to prevent any wide-spread looting that might have occurred in the midst of the chaos; however, the feared plague of lawlessness didn’t happen. Even the criminal element of New York rose to the occasion on that tragic day. Alas that the Governor of Louisiana saw fit NOT to nationalize that State’s Guard thus preventing the Feds from sending troops into New Orleans to counter the lawlessness that in fact WAS going on in THAT city during and just subsequent to Katrina.

The quote from Santayana is most appropriate especially with this enemy. 9/11 and what is going on around the world – and not just in the Middle East – is the continuation of a war that began when the forces of Islam invaded the Christian/Jewish ‘Holy Land’ and the last battle of THAT phase of the war saw Prince Eugen turn the forces of the Ottoman Empire away from the Gates of Vienna in the 1600s. Since that time, there has been a rather lengthy hiatus in the fighting until the fairly recent upsurge in Islamofacism (as it is being called). But it’s the same war waged by the same forces with the same intention – the institution of a World Wide Islamic State (or States). Greece lived under this tyranny for 400 years before gaining its freedom and my husband’s family can testify to just what that means.

If we do not persevere, if we are unwilling to know, recognize and resist this enemy, if we decide to try to ‘just get along’ so that it all ‘goes away’ (as if that were possible!), then I do not see a bright future for our way of life in this new millenium. I know that Westerners (including Americans) are impatient and want results NOW, but that isn’t going to happen in this struggle. Worse, still, every sign of our wavering resolution to see it through only widens the war, increases the violence and strengthens the resolve of our foe. Now is NOT the time for ‘politics as usual’ because our enemy doesn’t understand the freedoms that we take for granted. They see our open debate and political contests as weakness and disunion and we’d better understand that before too much more time passes.