Friday, September 11, 2015

September 11 - Remembering the Fallen

Wendell Berry has a poem:" Come to the Window and look out" That's what I want to do this sad day of remembering.

One year ago I walked through the World Trade Center Museum. What I remember most were the faces...all the faces that were lost that day.

We are told that of the several attacks that day 2,996 lost their lives.

Besides the people in the buildings and the planes also killed were:

343 Firefighters
37 Port Authority Policeman
23 Police Officers
2   Paramedics

Come to the window and look out. 

American service members killed in Afghanistan: 4,493
  Total service members wounded 100,000
  Vets with Brain injuries 320,000
   18 vets commit suicide daily

American service members killed in Afghan war: 2,361
    20,051 Service members wounded in action

Iraqi death toll of civilians : 500,000
Afghan civilians killed: 142,659-164,530

Come to the window and look out.

These figures do not include family members whose lives were torn from the roots this day 14 years  ago.
These figures do not include all those who worked tirelessly in the wreckage to rescue people only to find themselves sick and many disabled for life.


Come to the window and look out.

Statistics do not include the anger and the rage and a nation that somehow cannot come together on any issue that matters.
A country that will spend billions of dollars to elect someone to the highest office in the land.
A country that will still be divided by race, gender, status, rich,  poor, immigrants, refugees and people of several different religions or no religion.

Wendell Berry ends his poem:

"Leave your windows and go out, people of the world,
go into the streets, into the fields, go into the woods
and along the streams. Go together, go alone.
Say no to the Lords of War which is Money
which is Fire. Say no by saying yes
to the air, to the earth, to the trees, 
yes to the grasses, to the rivers, to the birds
and the animals and every living thing, yes
to the small houses, yes to the children. Yes."



--Roger Lovette / rogerlovette.blogspot.com
 







 

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