Yesterday morning, September 11th, 2019, I woke up to my father yelling at me to put my shoes on and go outside to help my mother. We had pouring rain all night, and we had two goat kids who had not gotten out of rain and were sick. At 6:10 in the morning, I ran outside, still in my pajamas, to go carry a goat kid into the garage. After that, we had to run the rest of the goats back into their paddock so that they would be fully out of the rain. This took 30 minutes, and I was covered in rain and mud by the time I got inside. I then rushed to get ready, because I needed to be at the school by 7:40 for marching band practice. Â
The rest of the morning was not much better. Marching band practice lasted for an hour and a half in horrible weather. Everyone else seemed to also be in a bad mood, which just made my bad mood worse. To cap the practice off, my band director told us we needed to be at the school at 7:30 the next morning, even though the lower grades had standardized testing and the seniors did not need to be at school until 9:50. By the time I left that class, I was fuming.Â
My second and third-period classes passed by without many hiccups. Then I went to lunch. Because my school was only five minutes from my house, my mom asked me to run home on my lunch break to check on the kids we had brought into the garage. Even though my lunch break was only 25 minutes, I grudgingly agreed to. I walked into my garage to find one dead goat kid and another barely hanging on to life. I am sure you can imagine how that felt. After I gave the kid that was still alive some water, I went back to town to pick up some lunch from the local Subway. I did not have time to eat it there, though, so I had to bring it back to school and eat it in my 4th-period class. Â
The rest of the school day went by, and then I went home. I walked into the garage to find the living goat kid barely breathing. I gently picked him up to try and get him standing and got to watch him take his last breath and then die in my arms. Â
This day had been one bad thing after another, from the time I woke up to the time I got home from school. Very little had seemed to go right. Â
None of that mattered because the date was September 11. Â
On September 11, 2001, terrorists under the direction of al-Qaeda attacked the United States. They took four planes hostage, flying two into the World Trade Center in New York City, one into the Pentagon in Washington D.C., and one into a field in Pennsylvania (the passengers of the fourth plane successfully fought back and crashed the plane before it reached its target, the White House). When the dust settled, over 3000 American lives had been lost in what was the worst attack on American soil since the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. Thousands more died in the aftermath of the attack, and American life and policy were forever changed. Â
The first line of casualties were the passengers on the hijacked planes and the people inside the World Trade Center and Pentagon. These civilians were caught in what would have been just another day in America and had their lives cut short in tragic fashion. The second round of casualties were the first responders who heroically went into those buildings to try and save the civilians inside. These brave men and women gave their lives to help their fellow man and died because of it. Then came the war in Afghanistan. The soldiers of the United States military, who went in to find the man responsible for these attacks, Osama bin Laden, went in knowing that the people of the US had put their faith in them and that they may never get to go home. The soldiers who died gave their lives to guarantee that no more American citizens would be killed in such a horrific fashion as what had happened on 9/11. Â
We as Americans must never forget the tragic events of September 11, 2001. We must always be on guard for a threat to American life and liberties like that posed by al-Qaeda. And we must never, ever, forget those who died, either on 9/11 or in the aftermath, because their deaths were not in vain. They did more than their part. We must always do ours. Â
Scott Howard is a constitutionally-minded conservative freelance writer with a focus on fiscal matters and foreign policy. You can follow him on Twitter: Follow @thenextTedCruz
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