Forward with resolve

Just as hearing the first sketchy reports of the events which spawned them did ten years ago this morning, watching today's commemoration ceremonies compels me to ask, "What, if anything can I do?"

Then, upon reflection, I realize that the question is already answered-I am already doing it.

The question was answered in the days and weeks immediately following the attacks, by our leaders who encouraged us to live our lives as normal-go back to work, keep shopping to sustain the economy, don't be afraid to travel by air again.  In other words, show our new enemies that they had failed.

And they have failed, as the existence of this blog and the technology it chronicles, at least in some small measure, attests.  It was five years ago today that I briefly recounted here having bought my first piece of Wi-Fi hardware the day before the disaster.  Within slightly more than two years of that purchase I was using it regularly at Union Station, one of the metro's first free and open public hotspots and the first one this blog reviewed.  Kansas City and the nation have only moved on from there, expanding free wireless Internet to the vast majority of our public libraries, many of our airports, and untold numbers of restaurants, cafes, retail stores and other locations.  In short, we have reasserted that we are a free people committed to free expression-and to continuing our development and expansion of the means by which we will express ourselves.

A small victory?  Considering the thousands of innocents slaughtered on that day, and the many thousands more serving under arms who have fallen since, perhaps.   But it is a victory nonetheless.

We are not and never will be exactly the same as we were before September 11, 2001.  But in the ways that truly count-the ways which those who visited evil upon us that day meant to erase-we did not and we will not change.  Our core beliefs are the foundation of our progress as a society and as a people.  We will not be intimidated into abandoning either those beliefs or that progress.

We are Americans, and the only way we ever move is forward.  And if that is not yet understood by those who despise us for it, the ultimate grief and the ultimate failure that will inevitably result shall be theirs alone.