9-11 +7...

Of course you know, as does everyone else on the planet (in the US anyway), that today is the 7th anniversery of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Seven years, it's gone by really fast to me.

• Seven years & the mastermind, Osama Bin Ladin, has still not been captured.
• Seven years & we still have troops battling on the ground in Afghanistan because the Taliban was never properly taken down.
• Seven years & we are more than 5 years into a war (actually invasion) with Iraq that our president claimed was in league with the 9-11 at the time, but was found later to be totally untrue.
• Seven years & thousands of brave military people dead, wounded, maimed for life with no end in sight.
• Seven years & even more thousands of innocent (read, civilian, non-combatants, women, children, elderly adults) Iraqis & Afghanis dead, wounded, maimed for life with no end in sight.
• Seven years & our country's credibility on the world stage at the lowest in more than a century.
• Seven years & our civil liberties still haven't recovered fully. We still can't peacefully march in protest of the president within his presence. They cart us off to "Free Speech Zones."
• Seven years & the 3,000+ innocents in the US who were killed during that attack are still as dead no matter how many "baddies" will kill.
• Seven years & we probably will be just as surprised when the next terror attack happens here, or in England, or Germany, or France, or Japan, etc.
• Seven years & there is still no way to block all potiential attacks, because there never has been & never will be.

My grand parents had FDR's death and Pearl Harbor as events, which they would preface with, "I remember exactly where I was when I first hear of....". For my parents it was Kennedy's assasination & Neil Armstrong's walk on the Moon. For me it's now the Challenger explosion in '86, AND 9-11. I wonder what the similar event will be for the next generation? Time will only tell, but there will be one. There always is.