About 9/11 and Our Country, Then and Now

Twenty years after the horrendous terror attack on our country on September 11, 2001 there are numerous ceremonies nationwide...and in particular on those sites of the villainous acts...honoring and remembering those who lost their lives.  America is unified in this, and the 3000 lives snuffed out on that day, along with the heroism of many who made that final sacrifice, should never be forgotten.  Arab extremist terrorists from Al-Qaeda plotted and carried out their scheme, which involved hijacking and piloting four passenger jets and flying them into the World Trade Center buildings, the Pentagon, and either the Capitol or White House...the last foiled when passengers and crew revolted and that plane crashed into a Pennsylvania field.  It's a shame that my country today is so divided about a different...but much deadlier...attack: that of a little virus, COVID-19, that so far in the past year and a half here has claimed nearly 660,000 lives.  Yet millions of people, many of whom were rightfully outraged at the 9/11 carnage and who expressed the willingness for our government...however intrusively...to drastically enhance its surveillance and security measures to protect us from future attacks, are hopelessly lost in a tangle of misinformation about the usefulness of masks and vaccines to save lives and curtail the pandemic.  I get it: comparing death figures can get a bit impersonal, and every one of those who perished on 9/11 should be treasured...especially those first responders who never hesitated to put themselves in harm's way to save others then.  But today's 660,000 number of COVID deaths (which is steadily climbing) is 220 times the fatalities from twenty years ago, yet these people all around me are sickly obsessed with losing their "liberty" from just wearing a flimsy little cloth mask to protect others around them from their exhaled germs, a common measure taken during epidemics that predates today by much longer than twenty years.  When the COVID vaccines came out a few months ago I thought good, now these bizarre anti-maskers can get inoculated and won't be such a threat to me, my family, friends, and society at-large.  But no, too many of them had to get themselves all hung up over the vaccine and refuse it as well...the resulting overcrowded hospitals with COVID patients, most of them by far unvaccinated, and the universal upsurge of the much more virulent Delta variant has prevented others with different life-threatening conditions from receiving their needed treatment. I myself came within days of having my own scheduled open heart surgery cancelled a few weeks ago, just because so many refused their civic duty to mask up and get vaccinated, easy and convenient measures that pose no danger to them.  I contrast this with the brave, sacrificial behavior of those 9/11 firefighters and others who laid down their own lives to save others and I cringe at the disparity between then and now...and it makes me much more apprehensive about our future than it ever did on that fateful day in September, 2001...