Letter to my daughters from Sept, 2001

[RareLubbockDem]

Just found this letter I wrote on Sept 14, 2001 for my girls. I thought it was interesting to see what it was I was thinking then, and how I (like most) could've never anticipated that 5 years later, we be in a foolish war, the rest of the world would not be behind us, and GWB would have really done nothing about what had happened on Sept 11. I was right--the world changed, but certainly not how anyone could've known. Very sad.....





September 14, 2001

To my daughters:

Your world changed this week.

I’m writing this to you on the day which President George Bush has declared to be a National Day of Prayer. It’s also being called a day of mourning. On Tuesday of this week, September 11, 2001, I dropped you both off at school, as I do most days. As I drove to work, I turned on the radio to hear that the World Trade Center buildings had been hit by hijacked airplanes. By the time I got home and turned on the TV, two other planes had crashed, one into the Pentagon, and one in Pennsylvania.

As I write this, I have a television on in the background. I just watched the president and Billy Graham at the prayer service in the cathedral, and now it is showing the brave efforts to dig through the rubble from the buildings and to try to find survivors. At this point, it’s not likely there are any more survivors. Now, it’s just a body count, and the estimates are saying around 5,000 people were killed. I suspect it will be much higher, but I pray it won’t be.

It’s a very sad time in our nation. I can’t even convey how sad it is. I’ve cried every day since this happened. I think everyone has. And we’re sad for so many reasons. I’m sad not only for the innocent victims of this horrible thing that happened. I’m sad for what it means to our country.

It hurts me a lot to realize that you may never know the world I grew up in, and that you may not remember much of the few years you had in it.

I know that this will be an event in your life that you will forever hear about, as will your children and your children’s children. That’s why I wanted to write to you this week, so you could have an insight into what was happening in my mind, and so when you wonder what it must have been like, you can look at this and at least see what it was like for me.

Like I said, as of Tuesday morning, your world just changed. All my life, we’ve seen the news about the Middle East conflicts. There were battles, terrorist attacks, and so forth on an almost daily basis. The United States, while we were concerned about it, was basically out of it. The truth is, the majority of Americans don’t even know why the people in the Middle East are fighting. There were always threats made against the U.S. because of our involvement in it, but it wasn’t taken very seriously by most of us. Until this week, it was absolutely inconceivable that we would ever have a true terrorist attack. But now we know differently.

We’ve also heard of the terrorist who probably did this, Bin Laden. As I write this, we don’t officially know who is responsible, but that’s who the press is saying it probably is. His name has come up many times over the past years in terrorist attacks in other countries, and everyone has always known he was dangerous, but it wasn’t as if we lived in any fear of this radical guy thousands of miles away.

Your world, until this week at least, has been one of complete freedom and relative safety. But this week, we were attacked. They attacked not only our buildings and our citizens, but our way of life. I don’t know if our way of life will ever be the same. I don’t expect it will be. And I don’t know how it will change, to what extent. But I fear for our future today. And I’m sad that you won’t have the same world that I did.

I hope that by the time you read this, you will not have had to live your life knowing all too well what terrorism and war and fear are. There are people around the world that grow up that way. I never planned for it to be that way for you, and I would have never imagined it would be that way. Maybe it will not have been that type of a life for you. I pray it isn’t. Maybe this can be resolved quickly. But I’m afraid. I’m afraid that you are now jaded to knowing war and horror and terrorism, that you have no real concept of it being any other way. I feel sick inside when I think of that happening to you.

In case that’s the life you’ve known, I wanted to give you some insight into our life before September 11, 2001. We’ve got a fairly new president, George Bush. This is his first real test. (He had a hard time with the election count, but that’s another piece of history I’m sure you’ve heard about.) We’ve had economic prosperity for many years. In fact, until fairly recently, the stock market was booming. There had been a downturn, and the biggest debate in Congress was what to do about the social security system. There was a lot of partisan bickering going on. Now, that’s the furthest thing from anyone’s mind.

As for our life, we’ve lived a relatively carefree life. I’ve never in my life feared for my safety. I fly to Dallas or Houston or Austin or Las Vegas probably 15 to 20 times a year, and I never even think about it. It’s just a way of life for me, and for millions of others. We all travel freely, anywhere in the country, either for business or for a vacation. Any danger we may have felt certainly didn’t have to do with a foreign country, it had to do with thugs in bigger cities. But that was easily avoided most of the time.

We’ve always felt safe, not only in traveling, but in everything. Our country and the benefits of it have possibly been taken for granted. We have a free economy, free speech, etc. Having always had it, we probably don’t appreciate it as we should.

We’re a proud country, and to have this happen to us has shaken us to the core. And what scares me most is the question of ‘what’s next’. Is this only the first of many attacks? And even if not, who do we retaliate against? An attack in the Middle East could set off a chain reaction of hatred and war against the U.S. No one knows, and all we can do is pray. We’re praying for our president and our leaders. We’re praying for the leaders of other countries as well.

I don’t know what to say to you really, except that I’m sorry this had to happen in your lifetime. I cry even as I write this because I worry about you. I worry about your future and what it holds. I want the very best for you, and I’ve tried to make it so, but this is so out of my hands, that I don’t know what to do. And that really hurts me, because I’d give my life to make yours better.

I can’t fully convey my feelings with this. Like the entire nation, I’m sort of feeling numbed about it all. But I hope this will give you some insight into the way we all feel right now, and I hope you understand that as your father, I am most concerned about how this will affect you in your life. I just felt I should put something down in words for you so you can understand the magnitude of this day in the history of our United States.


Love,
Dad