Twenty‑five years. A quarter century since those clear blue skies turned ash‑gray in New York. Every year I try to write something on this date, and every year I question whether it still matters. Words on a screen.
But then I remember Cynthia Giugliano. NYPD Officer Walter Weaver. Names you’ve seen honored, remembered, and carried on Turkey‑Talk since the attack. Names that matter. People that mattered. And they still do. Ripples of life interrupted and snuffed out for those on a path for the greater good.
What doesn’t seem to matter anymore, to too many people, is remembering. NYC has spent the last quarter century rebuilding, reinventing, and rebranding itself. That’s what New York does. The quiet countryside in an open field in Pennsylvania, healed, quietly embraces the Flight 93 Memorial. The Pentagon has also rebuilt from the damage. But at some point, the woke, far-leftists, the DNC, and the DSA across the country, and more poignantly so in NYC, began making friends with ideologies, stories, and political stances that blur the reality of who attacked us and why. That’s what I mean when I say they’re sleeping with the enemy. Not literally, mind you. Morally. There is no sidebar to sexual innuendo…
Revisionism has crept in. Outrage has faded. The memory of so many lives cut short has been diluted in the rush of progress and busy lives. Their tragic loss is an inconvenience in the face of embracing the senseless narratives we are bombarded with week after week. Are we to tolerate the insensitive commentary that we deserved 9/11, and all the other disparaging trash worthy of a throat punch or ass-wooping of epic proportions? Would any of us have stood for ten seconds of that nonsense on 9/12/2001?
So who’s the enemy? Al‑Qaeda. Terrorists driven by a desire to kill indiscriminately on a vast scale. Who think it’s a just, religious edict to cause human suffering, to banish infidels. Who were behind the act of bringing down civilian airliners carrying innocent souls? Who despise America. They attacked the Pentagon. They attacked our friends in Pennsylvania. They attacked the World Trade Center and everyone inside. They attacked our citizens. Our mothers and fathers. Our sons and daughters. Our neighbors, friends, coworkers. Is it not also the enemy, those who enable, coddle, and muddy the waters of reasoned opinion to give our mortal enemy a toehold directly into our society? The future outcome lies in plain sight and is even defended by those who sympathize with radical Islam.
They attacked Cynthia Giugliano on the 27th floor of Tower 1. They attacked Walter Weaver while he ran toward harm to help others. I knew none of them personally. But that doesn’t matter. Each life lost that day was a tragedy. A punch to the gut of America. Today, too many in our country barely flinch. Some say we deserved it…
Walk around DC and NYC these days, and it’s damn near unimaginable that America endured one of its most traumatic days right there on our own soil. Memorials full of ghosts while the city rushes by. Tourists taking selfies. Younger generations, lacking any substantive context, on the surface appear to view 9/11 as a diluted echo of something long past. Something boomers fuss about.
I live out in the turkey woods, though. Forgetting is not an option when you hunt. Nature has a way of engraving past seasons into your collective thoughts. You know every track on the ground. Every rustle of leaves. Every gobble thundering through the majestic maples. Those gobblers were here before you showed up. The woods demand you remember. Is it not the way we regard the most important events and loved ones in our lives? I think about those memories of that fateful day every year on September 11th. Not knowing what came next, knowing every plane strike, each body plummeting out of windows and ledges, meant the end of life, innocent life. Hearing the recorded phone call exclaiming, “LET’S ROLL,” grabbed each of us by the soul in the days that came afterwards. The stories are gut-wrenching.
I want the country to remember. I want those diametrically opposed to my worldviews and my politics to remember.
The families who still carry the weight, they painfully remember. They remember their loved ones’ lives were stolen by a fanatical ideology that deals in death on innocents and fear.
We owe them more than a passing thought. We owe them vigilance. We owe them truth. We owe them memory.
But memory has become inconvenient, comfort over clarity. Too many want to rewrite the past to fit the politics of the present. Too many have forgotten the promise we made: Never Forget, and treat it like a slogan instead of a duty of caring for our brethren. So on this 9/11/26, I’m asking, insisting that we stop pretending forgetting is harmless. It isn’t. Forgetting is how complacency grows. Forgetting is how danger slips back in. Forgetting is how a city, and a country, ends up sleeping with the enemy without reservation or, worse, with malicious intent.
Let’s remember Cynthia. Let’s remember Walter.
Let’s remember the heroes, those lost. Let’s remember who attacked us and why.
In twenty-five years, I have not forgotten:
The memories and the feelings from that day have not faded, nor diminished. It was to be a perfect bluebird day in September. The near-perfect September day morphed, shattered for thousands of victims in mere seconds for many, some in agonizing, terror-filled minutes, hours yet for others. In the ripples of life, our greatest loss is to never know or benefit from the great deeds and accomplishments of all those lost. That we came together as Americans. We were united as Americans. We still are Americans. Many have forgotten this very fact in recent times. Those that perished on this fateful day of September 11th, 2001.Those that gave all in order to save lives. Heroes that walk among us to this day.Those who survived only succumbed to it days, months, and years later. We are all equal by way of our Maker.
This is republished each year as I find it so important to include:
On each anniversary of 9/11, my thoughts return to two fellow NWTF members Cynthia Giugliano & Walter Weaver that we lost that day. A memorial webpage can be found at http://www.turkey-talk.com/9_11_01_memorial.htm
I ask that each of you give thought to those that serve us in all vocations. In your travels, I ask that you take the time to thank those that serve us, and continue to support what they do for our country.
Along with counting your blessings, say a prayer for all innocent victims, and that you do something on your part to make the world just a little bit better for those around you. We can all benefit from random acts of kindness.
-Mike Joyner
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