Today is the anniversary of the date when a bunch of Islamic radicals who came largely from Saudi Arabia, and whose Al Queda leadership were harbored by the Taliban in Afghanistan, struck the beautiful Twin Towers in New York City.
I grew up in NYC, but visited the top of one of the towers only once, and that was when guests were visiting and we wanted to impress them. But I had been around them, shopping underneath them, using them as navigation points in the crazy downtown street patterns in Chinatown. I liked to wander downtown and see the Towers peeking from around various street angles. I miss those buildings, but more important, the people in them are surely missed by those who loved them. They often worked in companies and industries that helped assure and enhance the financial power of the United States. These were not perfect people, or saints, or heroes. But they deserved to live the life that God (or science) blessed them with. It is a cruel thing and great arrogance to think you have the right to take a life.
I think of Hitchcock's movie Rope, which is one of my favorites, and where certain enlightened young men imagine that they can choose who is worthy of living and dying. It is Jimmy Stewart as their professor who expresses the moral outrage and poses the hard questions. "What gives you the right?" he essentially asks.
We musk ask ourselves that question in everything we do.
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