Watched Inside 9/11 on the Discovery Channel tonight, and my heart and spirit feel both very heavy and very down. All I can think is how sad it all was, and how petty in retrospect all the subsequent finger-pointing and blame-assessing seems to be. Personally, I think all the innocent victims of that day – whether it be the crew and passengers on those fateful flights, or those who worked in the Twin Towers or at the Pentagon – deserve much better than that.

More than anything else, after watching the special, all I could think about was how human the behavior was on that day – whether it be the transmissions between the firefighters rushing into the World Trade Center, or the 911 responders telling those hunkered down in the towers to stay put, or that poor sap who couldn’t make a decision whether or not Air Force fighters should be scrambled because everyone in authority “had left the room”. Anyone with any kind of perspective would realize that we as a nation got caught with our shorts down; you can blame President Bush, or the FAA, or the CIA, or the NSA, and that’s fine, but looking back, how in the world could anyone have predicted something like that happening, in that sort of way?

(And, BTW, to those who continue to promote absurd conspiracy theories, that 9/11 was somehow an “inside job” perpetrated by the government – all I can say is, shame on you. I’d like to say I hope you all rot in hell, but as a Christian…)

The sad truth is, the only way those who died on that fateful day can truly be honored is for we as a nation to do all we can to make sure something like that never happens again. While I have no doubt that, were I or others to find ourselves in a similar situation ever again (i.e., on a flight destined to create carnage of some sort) few would hesitate to take corrective and aggressive action – you can see that in the actions of the passengers on the “flying imams” flight from Minneapolis to Phoenix, I am equally distressed that relations between Democrats and Republicans in Congress have become so poisonous and politically polarized that little can be expected from our elected officials in Washington.

Tonight I will light a candle and say a prayer for all those innocents who lost their lives on September 11 and their families who still mourn and grieve their passing; may we as a nation never have to go through something akin to that fateful day ever again.