“Oz! Turn on your radio”
“Slow it down Bonnie”
“Jesus H, Oz TURN ON YOUR RADIO!”
Where our story starts
Where we know by heart
Every single flight
Welcome to the fog
Welcome to the trees
To the ocean and the sky
And whatever’s in between
To the ones who’ve left you’re never truly gone…
A candle’s in the window and the kettle’s always on
18 years ago…
For the first time in 18 years I nearly forgot what day it was. I’m in the midst of trying to figure out if that’s a good thing, or if it’s really really not.
It doesn’t feel like 18 years ago. 18 years ago the world shuddered to a gut-wrenching stop; and people who had been just going about their day…were suddenly…gone. 18 years ago, we all know what happened, we know how many planes, we know how many people…we think we know so much.
Flames licked, buildings tumbled, and a large portion of the world mourned; caught in a state of shock. Watching the same footage over and over again. A movie that didn’t end, that we couldn’t stop.
In the tiny Canadian town of Gander, Newfoundland…one little community felt the same shock waves as everyone else, and threw their doors open wide to 7000 “Come From Aways”…a tiny fragment of the world at its best, when the world was at its worst.
All around the globe people joined hands, and wept, and tried our best to stand firm.
And then time passed. Months became years, years became a decade…became nearly two decades.
And, despite our promises, we forgot.
We forgot them. We forgot what it felt like to stand united to try and make the world a better place in the wake of tragedy. It feels like these days, we only remember our revenge, and we use their deaths as a platform to stand against those that it would be ever so much better if we learned to stand with.
We are people after all, we’re all people.
It shouldn’t take tragedy. It shouldn’t. People should not need calamity to prove they can be good. We should simply be good.
18 years later…I still take a moment to wonder why we haven’t learned that yet…