16th Ammoversary of the 9-11 Attacks

Sixteen years ago, Middle Eastern terrorists financed by Osama bin Laden hijacked four (4) commercial passenger jets.  Two of the captured aircraft were flown in to the World Trade Center.  Another was crashed in to the Pentagon, located near Washington D.C.  We'll never know for sure just where the fourth hijacked airplane was going, the passengers decided to fight for their lives. 
It is believed that the hijackers chose to crash the plane, rather than be taken alive.

A lot has been said about this event, especially in the last ten years.  There is a new World Trade Center near the site of original structures that were lost when they burned.  So much has been written in books (fiction, non-fiction) and portrayed in movies that certain aspects of the tragedy are now a part of our social fabric.  According to some, "The War on Terror" has become a permanent feature of 21st Century life.  Decades after the fact, U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq are...still there. 
The international community cannot reach a consensus, nobody seems to have a workable solution for the factionalized terrorism that has since swept the globe.

As I write this, many of my fellow Americans are either conflicted or downright ambivalent about what happened and what it means for our future.  Anyone under the age of thirty has lived with this for half their life or more.  The simple fact is that some of our national and international past is coming back to haunt us.  Everything we never did during the Cold War and all of what we're still not willing to do about old hates now remains front-and-center.  Technology has transformed how we do just about everything.  Anyone with access to social media can interact with millions, if they want to.

There is more than one kind of extremism at work in the world today, all of it has roots in our past.  You'd think we could be capable of learning from all of our well-documented mistakes.  Okay, well.  That's what I'd like to believe.  I'm still of the opinion that we can make the future we want.  That, or we will get the future we deserve.