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In rubble, death and ash, the Twin Towers died.
America lived.
America lived because beneath the bluest sky that ever shone down on New York City, under clouds of smoke that dimmed the sun and blizzards of ash that turned all races gray, men and women cast aside everything except the one thing that mattered: helping those in need.
Strangers who that morning hustled past one another at a subway stop found the humanity and the courage to risk everything – including their lives – to bring others to safety, to show they cared, and to offer shelter against the pain.
A meme shared by Young Conservatives writer Michael Cantrell makes a powerful contrast between a day when there were no barriers of class and race and the America of 14 years later. “Thanks to Obama and other progressive race hustlers across the country, our nation is more divided than ever along racial lines, and there’s plenty of anger to go around on all sides of the issue,” Cantrell wrote, contrasting the finger-pointing of 2015 with the outreached hands that were the symbol of September 11, 2001.
“We were Americans, united together by grief and tragedy,” Cantrell wrote. “We were bathed in the smoke and ash that represented the hatred of a common enemy for our way of life, of the will of evil men who wanted to destroy us. On that day we stood together, helping and loving one another.”
The meme he shared to make his point is stark and gritty, like the day itself. It shows a diverse collection of people embattled and focused on survival, faces wreathed in the determination to endure, one small microcosm of the day that represented the best of America.
“While some might look at this photograph and see sadness and tragedy, I see hope,” Cantrell wrote. “You see, these evil men wanted to break our spirits, to make us cower in fear, to give up. We didn’t. We loved each other instead. We grew stronger together.”
That day, the superficial divisions that obsessed America a day earlier and do so again today were wiped away as the anguish of the attacks reminded us of what was essential. Americans helped Americans not because it was the politically proper thing to do, but because it was the only thing to do.
Cantrell mused upon the day’s meaning to a nation that shared a landscape, but not love
“Perhaps a day like 9/11 should serve to remind us all that at the end of the day, we need each other, no matter how different our beliefs,” he wrote. “Perhaps a day like 9/11 is a good time to stop looking at one group of human lives as more precious than another, and link arms as we traverse through the journey of life, picking each other up when we stumble and fall.”
Perhaps. Perhaps it is also a time to remember that ours has forever been a nation politically divided by squabbles every bit as intense and divisive as those of 2015. And yet, when America calls, when crisis hits, when the need is there, Americans respond.
And therein lies the hope neither race-rousing nor rubble can obscure.
h/t: Young Conservatives
The views expressed in this opinion article are solely those of their author and are not necessarily either shared or endorsed by WesternJournalism.com.