Three Years Later

I've written previously about Toronto Star Columnist, Rosie DiManno, and her amazing ability to articulate in words what a reader feels, and to do so in an amazingly personal, visceral manner. If my words ever approach the impact of hers, I'll be doing very well indeed.

Her perspective on 9/11, three years later, appears here. If you haven't yet familiarized yourself with her work, click here for a archive of her most recently-published work.

Tragedy on any scale leaves society - and the individuals who form it - a number of choices. At one end of the spectrum, we can choose to live in the depths of despair and thus relegate ourselves to an eternity of sameness. Or we can define the event as a turning point in history and choose to work to overcome the obstacles placed within our path.

With that in mind, time does little to ease the pain of those who lost so much on that day, and in the myriad other attacks that have punctured the everyday lives of innocents in the years since. But the fact that the righteous among us have chosen to stand against those who would wipe the achievements of humanity aside under the veil of endless hatred gives us hope that the future will be better than the present and the recent past.

It's lesson that has mattered countless times in history - the Holocaust, the Armenian and Rwandan slaughters, for example - and continues to matter today. May we never forget, and may we never be afraid to risk our own comfort to make right of what is morally wrong.