On This Tuesday, 9/11

Seventeen years ago on both this date and day Islamic extremist terrorists of Al Qaeda...15 of the 19 involved from Saudi Arabia...hijacked four American passenger jets and crashed them, bringing down the two World Trade Center towers, damaging the Pentagon, and one plane intended for the Capitol or White House taken down into a remote Pennsylvania field when its passengers bravely revolted.  The deaths from these attacks totaled about 3,000 with several thousands more injured...a great number of them were first responders at the Towers, killed or injured when they collapsed.  Since then the United States has been in a perpetual state of war in Afghanistan, where the then-ruling Taliban had been giving sanctuary and support to Osama Bin-Laden and his organization.  As I usually do on this date each successive year, I went through the TV channels looking for shows about this event which should never be forgotten or diminished...I was surprised to see that MSNBC, which had for years been faithfully rebroadcasting the NBC live ongoing account of that day's events, wasn't showing it anymore.  There were the events at the Trade Center site with the readings of the names of the dead from 9/11, the news channels were showing recaps of the attacks, and the History and Discovery channels had special 9/11 programming as well.  Maybe some of the other channels will devote something to it later, but I'll be at work then.  This year it seems to me like the "reading of the names" ceremony is being pushed as the main media remembrance, as opposed to the attacks themselves and the importance for us to remain vigilant and uncompromising in the face of terrorism.  I'll never forget 9/11 and get very frustrated when I hear political correctness about the source of most of our terrorism used to confuse people about the ideological background of its perpetrators.  And terrorism is still here as much as we might like to pretend that we are insulated from it...the tactics have changed but their violent, delusional hatred hasn't...