Today America marks the 19th anniversary of an event that along with Pearl Harbor will always be remembered as a day of infamy.
On Sept. 11, 2001 — on a warm and sunny late summer Tuesday morning — Islamic terrorists hijacked four airliners, two of which they crashed into New York’s iconic World Trade Center, leading to its destruction. Another airliner hit the Pentagon building in our nation’s capital, while the fourth plane, thanks to the heroic efforts of some passengers, never reached its intended target, slamming instead into a field near the small town of Shanksville, Pa.
While undoubtedly a national tragedy, these horrific acts of terrorism hit this state and region especially hard. The first two of those ill-fated airliners took off from Logan Airport. Of the 2,977 killed on that day, 206 had Massachusetts ties.
They included Dracut’s John Ogonowski, the gentleman farmer and pilot of American Airlines Flight 11, the plane that initiated the carnage by crashing into the World Trade Center’s north tower at about 8:45 a.m.
Acton’s Madeline Amy Sweeney, an American Airlines Flight 11 attendant, took it upon herself to relay the details of the airliner’s hijacking to a Boston supervisor moments before it met its demise.
Groton residents Peter Hanson, wife Sue Kim Hanson and toddler daughter Christine — the youngest 9/11 victim — were aboard United Flight 175 heading to Los Angeles to see Sue Kim’s family and visit Disneyland before hijackers flew the airliner into the World Trade Center’s south tower.
Many area communities bore the scars of a family member, relative, co-worker or friend felled by the events of this unimaginable day — David Kovalcin (Hudson, N.H.), Peter Gay and Peter Hashem (Tewksbury), David Bernard (Chelmsford), Brian Kinney (Lowell), James Hayden and Susan MacKay (Westford), Philip Rosenzweig (Acton) and Alexander Filipov (Concord).
Our country learned painful lessons from this catastrophe, some that should still resonate today.
For all of America’s armed might and projection of that military power around the world, it couldn’t prevent a threat of this horrendous scale from within its own borders.
It demonstrated what history has often taught: that powerful nations often dissolve from within, not from some perceived outside threat.
A national implosion of a different but equally momentous kind now keeps this country in an almost constant state of agitation. Visceral, partisan politics has seemingly spawned an even more militant form of socially acceptable behavior, the type that leads to unending violent protests and the destruction of property.
Nineteen years ago, President George W. Bush, less than eight months in office after winning a hotly contested, divisive election against Vice President Al Gore, stood in the midst of the World Trade Center’s still smoldering rubble and declared that “the people who knocked down these buildings will hear all of us soon.”
That moment galvanized a shaken nation behind its president, no longer a politician but the country’s leader in a time of crisis.
If he were alive today, we wonder if Abraham Lincoln would substitute this country’s crisis of ideology for slavery in his “House Divided” speech, given after the Illinois Republican Party nominated him as its U.S. Senate candidate in 1858.
In it, Lincoln declared “this government cannot endure permanently half slave half free.”
We submit that both of these propositions hold true.
Our wish on this solemn day of reflection?
That it won’t take another 9/11-like event for this country to be embraced — as Lincoln pronounced in his first Inaugural address — “by the better angels of our nature.”
