9/11 - Ten years gone by....

As I wrote in my blog post at this link last year, I dedicate this post this year with my best wishes to everyone, everywhere, who was affected by 9/11.

I can only hope that the people in this world can eventually find a way, somehow, to work toward a coexistence that's peaceful enough so that an event of this type never occurs again.  

Through photography, in the last year or so I've developed what I would describe as a significant interest in "the world".  I read a lot of photography and travel books, magazines, and blogs.  Through this material and the photographs within, something was sparked in my brain to want to learn more about all of the different countries and people in the world, and what makes them what they are.

As I read through these books and look at the photos, I'm learning much about the world and its people and why things are the way they are.  How thousands of years of history have shaped the people and countries on this planet.  I don't agree with a lot of things that many people in this world do, but at least now I'm beginning to understand it better.

Perhaps if we all took a little more time to study the world and the people around us, we might begin to reach an understanding of each other that would some day lead to something closer to the peaceful coexistence that I mentioned above.  I can only hope...

This year my kids began asking more sophisticated questions about 9/11.  They want to understand what it's all about, why it happened, and why so many people died on that one day.  It also helps them to understand things like why they hear "Afghanistan" and "Iraq" on the news every night...

My wife and I do the best we can to answer their questions in a way that they can understand that doesn't scare them, and we've let them watch some of the 9/11 television specials this year.  I think they're at an age where it's important for them to learn these things.  Without letting it become overbearing on them, I think it's OK now for them to learn on a more complex level that there are good people and bad people in the world, and sometimes the bad people do some really terrible things.

As I write this on the eve of the 10th Anniversary of 9/11, I'm very sad.  I sit and stare at the 9/11 specials on TV.  Just absorbing them.  And after ten years, there's some part of me that still finds the whole thing quite difficult to comprehend.  But I maintain my hope that I wrote about above that some day, somehow, the world will become a better place to be.  The future generations deserve better than this....

Now that the 9/11 Memorial in New York City is open and almost complete, I will go there with my wife and kids some day soon to see the park, the memorial fountains, and the new One World Trade Center building.  I'm sure it will be a very emotional visit.

And from this day forward, I will no longer call that area "Ground Zero" anymore.  It deserves better than that.  I will call it what it used to be called.  The World Trade Center.