Looking back, looking forward

Today, of course, is pretty historic. I kind of hoped I'd written down something in my journal on that day, but that was before I was very consistent. I still might have... however, I packed the journal it might be in underneath a bunch of other boxes already.

My story is a little different: I was in Switzerland with some family and we had spent the day out sightseeing. As we got in the car (maybe around 6 PM?), my uncle turned on the car. I remember hearing some words I actually recognized (like "American") but didn't think much of it until we got back to where we were staying and my uncle turned on the television. He told us that two planes crashed into the World Trade Center, and I remember looking at the image of two towers in flames. It was a pretty quiet night. Most people we talked to after that, upon finding out that we were American, were sympathetic. However, our main concern was that we were planning on travelling home soon, and would we be able to fly out when scheduled? Maybe that was very selfish, but being away from it all and certainly not putting a damper on a vacation, we didn't dwell a lot on the event.

Today, Gary showed me some footage from the live news coverage. I actually saw a plane fly into one of the towers, which I'd never seen before. And I wondered how someone could do that, and felt that sort of sickness I'm sure everyone already felt thinking about the people on the plane and in the tower. I realized the bravery of the first responders who tried to help those in the buildings and surrounding areas, not knowing that they would collapse.

It's funny how ten years later, I think I'm more impacted than I was on the actual event.

However, I'm grateful for where we are. I don't know how I feel about this war on terrorism, but I hope that the world is at least a little better for what we have done in the past ten years. That we are better. Sometimes... well, I don't always feel that patriotism that I felt back then as we all pulled together to show our support and take strength from each other. Sometimes I feel things are worse than ever in the government. And that they'll only get worse. But maybe we'll continue to stand by each other, in spite of how we feel about politics. Who knows.

In other news, I'm in the "home stretch" of pregnancy and looking forward to a new little life. And I'm pretty confident that we'll be able to raise her in a good home, that she'll be relatively safe, and that we can teach her the morals and ideals that I knew and loved growing up.

So at least a terrorist attack didn't change our fundamentals. Take THAT.