NINE YEARS AGO:...A Bloody Moment That Stopped Time in America...Remembering Sept. 11...

By ELIOT ELCOMEDOR
Editor-In-Chief

McALLEN, Texas - They, and that's historians, too, like to say that Americans no longer remember the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese in 1941 - the sneak aerial assault on our Navy base in Hawaii that threw us into World War II. Well, of course Americans remember that "date that will live in infamy," as then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt put it that fateful day. The sinking of the U.S.S. Arizona? Absolutely.

Saturday is the ninth anniversary of the horrible attack on New York City by terrorist bent on destroying iconic symbols of this great land - the World Trade Center Towers in southern Manhattan. It is a day few have forgotten, and with good reason. Prior to that bloody morning, the American homeland had never been attacked, regardless of what the Mexican bandit Pancho Villa believes happened a century earlier in Columbus, New Mexico. By nightfall on this particular day, both towers would be on the ground and more than 3,000 people killed in the brazen attack that included the use of two American Airlines jetliners flown into the landmark 100-story buildings.

Life changed for the country that morning in many, many ways.

Americans grew to feel wary of foreigners, Persians especially. And they grew to know that things would never, ever be the same again. For us, it was as if no one else could understand our grief, our pain, or anger. But Italians would have felt the exact same thing had terrorists bombed the Vatican into Kingdom Come, or had terrorists downed the Eiffel Tower in Paris, or the Kremlin in Russia.

That is  precisely why it still hangs heavy in our national psyche.

America, the greatest country in the world, had taken one for no damned reason, had not been attacked by a foreign flag, but by 19 terrorists, most with ties to Saudi Arabia. Their reasons were as narrow as as is hate between neighbors. A few ventured to say that these terrorists were angry at our involvement in the Persian Gulf War a decade earlier, when American soldiers had liberated tiny Kuwait following the Iraqui bully Saddam Hussein's invasion of that country. The reasons did not fly with Americans. it was too extreme a reaction, too horrible, too barbaric.

It's now been nine years since that day in New York. The heart-tugging images remain as clear as if it all happened yesterday (see photo above).

Perhaps, it'll diminish in scope in 30 or 40 years, in the manner that the pain of Pearl Harbor diminished as the veterans of that era died and the imagery faded with every passing year. Maybe. But, as yet, no one is ready to see 9.11 pass onto the pages of history books. The wound is still open, and it should be...

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