How's it going, America,
Check out our latest episode of The Pod Millennial! I talk to award-winning director Matthew Thayer about his latest documentary, Can You Hear Me Now. We dive into the intriguing intersection of faith, politics, and prophecy, particularly in the context of the 2020 election and the role of figures like Charlie Kirk. Matthew shares his personal experiences with prophetic culture, the challenges of filmmaking, and the importance of faith in public life. New episodes drop every Tuesday! Listen, rate (5 stars, of course!), and subscribe!
Let's get into it:
I'm sure you've all been inundated with videos, memories, and reflections of that fateful blue-sky Tuesday 25 years ago, and I know many of you have those memories yourselves. It's hard to forget the moment that our nation was attacked, its commercial airliners turned into weapons, and more than 3,000 people were murdered by terrorists. This was the end of our national innocence. Suddenly we knew that vast numbers of nations and people hated us.
I've found myself looking at those videos, the people falling from the towers as the flames ballooned out the sides of what seemed like invincible infrastructure, as those inside the planes lodged inside the buildings had no chance of escaping the horrid fate that befell them. I wasn't in New York that day, and I had an odd moment where I realized the friends I had who would have been down there that day had already died the year before.
I had been to the World Trade Center a bunch of times. My grandfather took me up there, and I went a bunch with my mom to get Broadway show tickets from the downtown TKTS booth where you could buy discounted tickets for day-of performances. It was just 12 days after 9/11, on Sept. 23, 2001, that we had show tickets and we all went, my mom, my brother, my husband, and my grandmother.
We were at the last showing of A Thousand Clowns, a Herb Gardner play starring Tom Selleck. The play had been a 1960s film starring Jason Robards and it was a show we all really loved. Broadway hadn't turned off the lights, and we'd been planning to go for a long time, so we went.
When we got off the train at Penn Station, we were overwhelmed by the missing posters. Every wall was covered with 8.5 x 11 sheets of paper with inkjet and laser-printed color images of thousands of people who were missing after the towers fell. Smiling faces stared back at us with names, begging for information, phone numbers to call if we'd seen them. Of course, we hadn't seen them and they would never be seen again.
This was before ubiquitous cell phones, we hadn't brought cameras. All we had were our eyes to record these images, to carry with us, to mark the day. Walking past firehouses was devastating. So many of them had rushed in to help and their lives were lost to that cause. We walked down the sidewalk taking it all in and a midtown crowd that usually rushed past was also moving slowly, everyone in a daze of having been terrorized, attacked. The city skyline looked like teeth had been ripped out.
It was just a few weeks later that I was in attendance at a playwriting workshop downtown, on Broadway and White Streets, at the Flea Theater. I was studying with Maria Irene Fornes and staying in a hotel for a few days. Verizon had put up a bank of free pay phones in the street on Broadway so people could get in touch with whoever they needed to. So many people couldn't go home.
And now we remember the tragedy, but we forget the reason. We remember to mark the day with remembrances, but we refuse to look at the cause. It was just a few years ago when TikTokers were making Islamist terrorist Osama bin Laden's letter in The Guardian go viral. He talked about America as the evil empire and these kids were like "oh yea, that's for sure, we are evil." The new norm is to believe somehow that we deserved to get attacked. We didn't.
In response to 9/11, our nation has decided to be more acquiescent to the terrorist ideology that fueled the men who attacked us and the massive terrorist network that supported them in their deadly efforts. The Democrat Party upholds men and women who espouse these values as part of their big tent. They embrace them, not the least aware that this embrace will spell the end to liberalism. Our children learn Islamism isn't that big a deal in schools. Some schools are even working to remove references to Islam from lessons about 9/11.
At every turn, we have made the choice to accept this terror as our just desserts and have not fought it, tooth and nail, the way we should have. We've accepted the perception our haters have of us. Now, here we are 25 years later, and it's time to cast that off and recognize that we were attacked by people who hate our American culture, our way of life, and the foundations of Christianity upon which our nation was built and our civil society runs. Turn back from the self-hatred and truly embrace the only nation that stands for equality, freedom of speech and religion, social mobility, individual liberty, and opportunity.
Libby