I’m a military brat. Most of my early memories from childhood revolve around living on or near military bases. I think the largest blessing of my time as a brat was when my family was stationed at Spangdhalem Air Force Base Germany. We had one TV channel in our home on base housing and it was of course AFN. Because we weren’t inundated with pop culture, we younger brats weren’t influenced so much by the negative aspects of it and since all of us had at least one military parent, we all tend to have a special place in our hearts for the military.
Our return to the US brought us to Maelstrom AFB in Montana, then Tyndall – my middle school years and high school years were in Springfield, FL. My early college years were here in Okaloosa County.
I did spend some time living in NY. After meeting my wife, I became professionally involved with computers and in 2008, a Fortune 500 company in NY paid for myself and my wife to relocate to Long Island. The first hotel we stayed at had a bar themed for Fire Fighters. This was six years and some change after 9-11 but these first responders were celebrating the life of one of their fellows they lost. Volunteer fire departments across Long Island had sent firefighters and paramedics to ground zero and many of these volunteers were lost to sickness. I didn’t stay – it was clearly their bar that night. We never planned to stay so long in Long Island. Had the adoption of two of our daughters not taken so long, we would have left much earlier than we did, but the striking thing about our time there was the depth and longevity of how 9-11 impacted the people of New York.
You didn’t have to go far to find someone who’d been directly affected. My first boss on Long Island had worked at Deutsch Bank and was fortunate enough to be at street level when the Towers fell and destroyed Deutsch Bank’s top floors where he worked. A co-worker at the same company we worked at had lost her husband, a police officer who died of sickness caused by being at ground zero. While working at another company that fell to Bernie Madoff, I had the privilege of seeing our software in use at a secondary emergency response site for NYC should another 9-11 level threat occur, Another co-worker at a later company lost his father, a fire fighter who had gone blind before passing away because of his exposure. I’m told that Brookhaven National Lab where I would later work sent its unique heavy construction equipment to ground zero to help efforts there. There’s a 9-11 monument onsite, created from a piece of Twin Towers girder.
One of the things though that brings me the most sadness about our current times is I had this sense when COVID hit that it would be a relatively short-lived crisis. I thought that as a nation, we’d come together again like we did in the weeks following 9-11, that the partisan divide would be set aside and we’d all knuckle down and in a show of national unity, kick this crisis to the floor. That has not come to pass.
But I remain hopeful that no matter what happens in the following months, that we can regain that sense of national togetherness, those weeks of kindness and tenderness to one another, that sense of compassionate unity. But today, in this time of crisis, please keep in your hearts those who protect us, from the men and women serving in our military to those first responders who show up to aid us in our darkest hours, to the people fighting for us now in hospitals across America as well as the essential personnel working across the country to ensure our families get the goods and services we need. We are resilient America. We can overcome this crisis.
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