September 11th

It’s not that I don’t have the words. It’s that I have too many words and too many strong emotions. I’ll let Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick speak for me instead:

“We have lived the last six years in the shadow of that tragedy. We carry the vivid reminders of the pain and of the anger we felt. But we must also carry the vivid reminders of the compassion and generosity that was shown that day and in the days and weeks that followed. The coming together that happened not only in communities that lost a loved one and not only in New York or Virginia or Pennsylvania or in Washington D.C. and not only in the United States, but all across the world. That is the spirit in which we reconvene today. That is what must last.

Because among many other things 9/11 was a failure of human understanding. It was a mean and nasty and bitter attack on the United States. But it was also about the failure of human beings to understand each other. And to learn to love each other. And it seems to me that lesson and that warning is something that we must carry with us every day.

Fortunately for human beings, the human heart is not designed to carry grief forever. Somehow we manage to move on. And that may be, in some ways, our greatest strength. We live in a rare place where our ideas, our shared goals and our common humanity will and must be more powerful and must ultimately win out over intransigence and anger and violence and division.

Tempered by these losses we will emerge a strong and better place. That is how we best serve the memories of those we love. We do that not in anger at the horror of their loss, but in honor of the beauty of their lives. We miss them not because they are gone, but because they were here.”

- from Governor Deval Patrick’s address
at today’s 9/11 Remembrance Ceremony