A Decade...

Tonight, I’m sitting in front of a flat screen TV watching Frontline on PBS, my dogs snoozing on both sides of me and my beautiful wife working out on the elliptical on the other side of the room.  I have 14 squadron Corpsman, of whom I herd like cats and spend an extraordinary amount of time trying to keep my programs at work running on a day to day basis.  Life is full and busy, both professionally and personally. 

A decade ago today, all I was responsible for was child support and some other minor bills, not a care in the world other than making it to my next paycheck.  My entire world stretched out to a dozen or so people, my connection to the world and was though Morning Edition on NPR on the way to work.  I had taken a hiatus away from the world as a whole and couldn’t imagine anything dragging me back in to it. 

Little did I know…

I grew up on September 11^th, 2001, a part of my childhood died that in disbelief.  I came back into the Navy a changed man, I wasn’t the rebel who had joined because he was running from something at 18, I was a man with a focused goal to do something that had meaning and had a core of fire burning bright inside of me.  Since, ten years have gone by, I’ve spent a quarter of that time in a war zone in a country that I was a bit vague about the location just ten years before but has since become my home away from home. 

With OBL (I won’t spell his name out) no longer in the picture, much of that anger that I had as faded.  Today, I can’t name anyone that I hate and have left many of those emotions on the other side of the world.  Each year on this date, I’ve thought about how much has changed for me, I’ve wrote about it here, here and here and maybe this year, I think I’ve come to the point where we need to start working past that event and start healing and maybe atoning for things that anger made us do.

I for one, am a better man then I was before that day.  I love the person I’ve grown into and love the richness of the people in my life with all of their differences.  I still grieve for the loss that day but I think that it is time for people to start looking at other people as people again and to once again value human life, beauty and dignity.  This glamor of anger that has been cast over much of the world needs to come to an end because I think a lot of people are tired of it.  Not that I’m going to be the guy to make it happen but I’m sure there are people out there like me who believe the same thing.  I’m just putting my thoughts on the internet and maybe some of these folk will too and eventually if enough of them speak up, that will add up to a voice that might turn a mind or two down a different path. 

I'd welcome you.