A day seared in our minds, mostly for the sheer brutality

An American flag flies amid the rubble of the World Trade Center in the days after 9/11. (US Dept. of Labor photo)

Anyone old enough to remember 9/11 is old enough to remember when we felt differently about our safety and security as a nation and a people.

The horror that we all endured that day is told in a million tales from members of families who lost loved ones to just regular folk that watched TV with equal measures of anger, disbelief and fear.

Is anything sacred? Is anybody safe? Can anybody protect us?

Working at a local newspaper at the time, one of my jobs was to select art that best depicted the tragedy that occurred in New York, at the Pentagon and in a Pennsylvania field.

Pentagon images were barely recognizable, very limited and likely heavily vetted by military brass, while few images came out of the Pennsylvania crash site.

But the images from Ground Zero at the World Trade Center were prolific, with hundreds transmitted by wire to newspapers all over the world by the AP and other news services.

One photo of a man and a woman holding hands and jumping from the towers to their deaths instead of being burned to death haunts me to this day.

There were many other photos that editors decided not to run. Maybe we should have. Who really knows?

The fear and despair that we felt seeing those images, both in still photos and video footage, haunts many more people than I. That I know for sure.

Like 9/11. Pearl Harbor Day, Dec. 7, 1941, is another date that will live in infamy, another date that should remind us there is evil in this world, evil that has to be rooted out and destroyed before it can grow and destroy us.

And like Pearl Harbor, we will never forget.

And as was the case with Pearl Harbor we will persevere.

- HT