Today is September 11th, 2002.

Here is what I had to say about the day last year.

I don’t think that it is right to call it “Patriot Day” for the reasons outlined in last night’s post. But we should not forget what happened nor should we forget those who perished.

We should also not forget that just because people are different from us – by virtue of race, creed or color – that they are not automatically “against us.” America was established as a country where the freedom to be different and to disagree with our countrymen were not seen as “bad things” (…unless you lived in Salem, MA and were thought to be a witch, but that’s another story).

We call ourselves “…the land of the free and the home of the brave.” I would say that we should challenge ourselves to be brave in ways that we might not have considered before:

  • We should be brave enough to remember that we are not alone in the world.
  • We should be brave enough to know that there are those who do not like us because of the very freedoms that we espouse.
  • We should be brave enough to not only uphold our rights to be free, but also to help, not impose our concept of freedom upon, those who wish to be free.
  • And, most importantly, we should be brave enough to remember that we, the American people, are a diverse people. We may be united under a common banner, but we are not all the same. We should respect each others’ rights to be different and that it is alright to have divergent viewpoints.

Peace.