Remembering a day I want to forget

On most Thursdays in the fall, I'd spend the majority of my day thinking about what lineup I'm going to submit for my fantasy football team this week, or how the Redskins plan on stopping Drew Brees and the Saints this Sunday. But not this Thursday. Today, my mind – like many of yours has probably been – is fixed on the past. Seven years ago to the day. A day I don't want to remember, but one I'll never forget.

Sept. 11, 2001 started like any other day for me during my sophomore year at Salisbury University. I woke up way too early for my tastes and headed over to campus, cursing at myself for scheduling an early class. As I sat in Physical Geography, thoroughly bored, the United States was changing forever a mere couple hundred miles away, and I had no clue. It started with some uncharacteristic mumbling in the hallway that turned into conversations, that turned into silence. Deafening silence. Before I knew it, a university official came into our classroom and informed my professor that school would be dismissed for the rest of the day. Normally, this would result in sheer ecstasy, but not that day.

I left class and hurried to my car, trying to call anyone I could think of to figure out what was going on, but I kept getting the same automated message on my cell phone. "All lines are busy." I got home and turned on the TV minutes before the second plane hit. I remember seeing the smoke and wreckage of the first plane that had hit, and thinking it was a tremendously tragic accident. And then that second one hit, and word began to come out about it being a terrorist attack.

I was stunned. I didn't know what to say or what to do. I had no clue how to react, except to sit there, speechless, horrified and incredibly scared. And not scared like when I thought Freddy Krueger was in my closet. The kind of scared that only something of this magnitude could produce.

As the day wore on, we learned about the Pentagon and the plane that went down here in Pennsylvania, and I became even more shocked. How could this have happened HERE? Who the hell is doing this to us? That was all I could think. How? Why? What did we do to deserve this?

Seven years later, I have the answers...somewhat. How? Cowards manipulated their way into control of airplanes and changed the course of history. Why? Because they dont' like our country. What did we do to deserve this? Nothing. NO ONE deserves that kind of attack and brutality.

I was angry about what happened that day for a very long time. In a way, I'm still angry today. I'm angry that the cowards in the Taliban will be in my child's history book. That they'll spend parts of marking periods talking about those events and that questions about that day will appear on a history test. The Taliban doesn't deserve to be in my country's history for what they did. I'm angry that hundreds of thousands of innocent Americans lost their lives. Fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters. Heroes like the emergency workers who put their lives on the line to help and the people that stopped that plane in Pennsylvania before it could strike another building, forfeiting their lives so other people could live.

We've all gone on with our lives seven years later, but this is a day we should always pay respect to those who died that day. So tonight, forget about the bills on the table or that you just payed $100 to fill up your gas tank. Tonight, go home and hug your children. Give your spouse a kiss. Call your parents. And tell them all that you love them. Because if we learned anything from that horrible day seven years ago, it's that we are extremely resilient as a nation and that terrorist attacks can happen any time and take lives away in an instant.

Because at the end of the day, it's those closest to you that define who you are and who you want to become. And today is a day to appreciate those people as well as the millions of victims that you didn't know.

God bless America.