When Alan Jackson sings the lyric, “Where were you when the world stopped turning that September day?” nobody needs to ask what day he is singing about. We all remember exactly where we were on Tuesday, September 11, 2001 when we heard about the planes crashing into the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and that lonely Pennsylvania field.

But what were we doing on Thursday, September 6, 2001?

Some folks might have been watching Justin Timberlake perform with Michael Jackson on the 2001 MTV Video Music Awards.

Sport fans could have been looking 420 feet over the fence at right field center in
Pacific Bell Park where Barry Bonds launched his 554th home run, putting him in the “60 Home Run Club” with Babe Ruth as the fifth player ever to hit 60 home runs in a single season.

Jeffrey Skilling, the CEO of Enron was issuing a sell order for 200,000 of his shares in the company because, prosecutors later alleged, he knew Enron was about to totally collapse into chaos and bankruptcy.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld sent a September 6, 2001 letter to Sen. Carl Levin telling him that he would urge Pres. Bush to veto a proposal to transfer $600 million in the defense budget from missile defense to counterterrorism.

At his 2002 terrorism sentencing hearing, John Walker Lindh testified that after leaving his home in California, he first went to Yemen to study Arabic and from there to Pakistan to attend an Islamic school. He said it was when he arrived in Afghanistan on September 6, 2001 that he decided to join the Taliban as an armed combatant.

Londoners on September 6, 2001 might have been reading the article, “Bin Laden Foreign Legion Fuels Hardline Expansion” in The Guardian newspaper, by reporter Rory McCarthy: “The Taliban are believed to run camps where they train Chechen fighters, Pakistani sectarian extremists and soldiers from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. The Taliban have refused to hand Bin Laden to the US for trial, despite two years of UN sanctions. ‘Osama bin Laden came as a holy warrior,’ said Maulvi Qudratullah Jamal, the Taliban information minister. ‘He is a very calm man and he respects Islamic law. He is a good man and he doesn’t want to harm anyone.’”

Five days later, on September 11, 2001, our world stopped turning.

On September 12, 2001, it was a new world for us all. We made commitments of what we would do and resolutions about how we would truly cherish the important things in our lives – our God, our family, our neighbors, and our nation.

We swore we would never again underestimate the intensity of the hate that jihadists have for anyone — Christians, Jews, or moderate Moslems — who does not agree with their twisted vision for the world.

We said we would never, we could never, forget.

On this 10th anniversary of 9/11, as we remember the losses of that day, maybe we need to also remember how comfortably we rested on 9/06 in our ignorance.
Perhaps the lyrics we need to be listening to are these by Darryl Worley:

Have you forgotten how it felt that day?
To see your homeland under fire,
And her people blown away.
Have you forgotten when those towers fell?
We had neighbors still inside going thru a living hell
And we vowed to get the ones behind bin Laden.
Have you forgotten?

Mike Sharman, a resident of Foothills of Faith Farm in Madison County, Virginia, has served as an attorney and guardian for children for more than two decades. He has written Faith of the Fathers: Religion and Matters of Faith Contained in the Presidents’ Inaugural Addresses from George Washington to George W. Bush. You may contact him at [email protected]