Just over a year ago, my family moved back here after 14 years in Washington,
D.C. During most of those years, my husband worked at the Pentagon.
I drove past the building almost every day. Our son was in the day care
center there for a year. After Oklahoma City, we were always aware that
one day, some kind of terrorist attack could happen. False alarms evacuated
my husband's office. Anti-terrorist barricades surrounded my son's school.
In the hospital where I served as a chaplain, we held code yellow drills
to practice preparing for a major disaster, with a terrorist attack
as one possible scenario.
Now it has happened, in greater magnitude than even those who prepared
for it ever imagined. Because I know Washington, because I can see in
my mind exactly where the plane went down, because I know that we must
know someone who died but don't know who yet, because I know my fellow
chaplains are doing the work we trained to do, it is this devastation
there that is most real for me. I feel horror, rage, and utter helplessness.
I imagine that many of us here have this kind of connection, or one
even closer, whether to D.C., New York, Pennsylvania, or to those four
airplanes. Those in Washington who worked for the Pentagon (as well
as many in New York and those four airplanes) were those who served
this country. They were military personnel and civil servants, law enforcement
agents and emergency personnel. I am not saying that their deaths are
more honorable or more tragic than any other. I only wish to acknowledge
their work and their service to our country as part of our national
grief.
Almost anywhere else in the world, such a series of catastrophic attacks
would topple a government. I say this not to be jingoistic and arrogant
but because it is true. We have the infrastructure in place to hold
together, even if parts of our country are in tatters. We can be grateful
to our public servants--federal, state, local and military--who continue
to make this true. We gather to bear witness to the loss of so many
of them, to those injured and to the families left behind.
