Please, Don't Rescue Me

There are moments in my life that stand out so crisply in my mind that if I could paint them, I would. I long for the camera that captures what only I can see.

I live less than half a mile from the Pentagon. It's an impressive place. Clearly built for protection and not rescue. Every day men and women in uniform walk the sidewalks past my apartment on their way into work. I want to lean out the window and say thank you.

One of those brain-picture moments is from the 9/11 search and recovery at the Pentagon. It was evening and I was down with the care and feeding efforts for the S&R folks who were working at the site. The air was chilly and strangely silent for all of the activity going on around us. More than an hour had already passed as I'd repeatedly watched man after man come down from the building, weave their way through the debris and ground operations and make their way to the tents we called "Unity City." Inside those tents we had all the things that people give to those who are doing the unimaginable.

S&R uniforms have pockets. Lots of pockets. And our tables included candy and lots of it. They'd come to these tables, load up with candy and then head back up into the building. The candy in their pockets would help cover the taste and smell that filled their mouths and nostrils as they dug through the burned and still smoldering remains of the plane & Pentagon victims of 9/11.

I hate crowds. The reason I was there was to help plan some next steps in our organization's response. But I needed to get away from the activity and the awesome emotion of it all. So I wandered off for a bit, quietly chatting with Gerald and processing all that I was seeing. As we talked I looked up at the gaping hole in the side of this amazing building and I stopped...

...this is the picture.

A smoldering, gaping black hole in the side of the Pentagon and hanging from the roof next to it an American flag. Framing this, a starless Washington DC night sky with the Washington Monument glowing in the background. A cold breeze nipped and kissed my cheeks and I could feel my hair fluttering against my neck. I was spellbound.

I stood there staring and Gerald looked down at me and seeing what must have been an ashen face, asked "are you okay?" I told him I was. Compared to so many others that day, how could I not be?

But inside I was screaming "no, I'm not okay. WE are not okay. THIS is not okay."

The people killed in the Pentagon that day died at their desks, in meetings, on the phone, doing whatever it was that they did in performance of their jobs - jobs that were essentially this, to protect the United States of America and her citizens within.

No one will argue that they did their job perfectly every day. But they did it. And they died doing it. Mundane every day jobs for most of them. Jobs they rose for early in the morning, fought traffic to get to, and I'm sure they never thought would get them killed.

I think that there are a lot of people who look at the U.S. Government as somehow responsible for rescuing them from whatever it is they need to be rescued. Me? I want the government to help us be a better nation and to protect my freedoms while they protect us from those who don't want us to be better...or free.

I want the deaths of those people to not have been in vain.

So please, don't rescue me. Instead, protect. Protect us all. Protect us from our greed. Protect us from our neediness. Protect us from our willingness to follow blindly those who promise to rescue us from ourselves. I don't need rescuing.