We will not forget
Next Friday, it will be 25 years since the terrorist attacks on our county.
We, as Americans, will again remember.
And we, as Americans, will not forget.
To mark the date known as 9/11, three commemorations will be held in Cape Coral next week.
The city of Cape Coral will again hold its remembrance on the lawn at City Hall.
This year’s observance, to be held next Friday beginning at 8:30 a.m., will focus appropriately on the victims — all those who died in New York at the World Trade Center, in Washington, D.C., at the Pentagon, and in a field in Pennsylvania in the synchronized attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
Nearly 3,000 Americans died, from eight children on hijacked planes to numerous first responders — firefighters, paramedics and police officers — who put duty first as they climbed the stairs of the plane-struck Twin Towers to save others.
Each — all 2,977 of the dead — will be remembered with an American flag bearing their name.
A second public commemoration will be held at American Legion Post 90, beginning at 11 a.m. at the post at 1401 S.E. 47th St.
A third -actually the first in terms of timing — will be hosted by 92.5 FOX News which invites the community to visit the “Field of Flags” at Bernice Braden Park near the Cape Coral Bridge. The commemoration will begin on Labor Day, Sept. 7, at 9 a.m. with a traditional planting of American flags which will remain standing through Sept. 11.
As a community, as a country, we vow to never forget, not only the fallen of 9/11 but all those who have followed — the more than 800,000 who enlisted and voluntarily served in Operation Enduring Freedom, including the near 2,400 who did not come home from that fight in Afghanistan; the more than 20,000 who returned wounded in the effort to prevent another such attack on American soil; survivors who continue to die each day due to suicide, addiction, cancers and other ailments directly linked to 9/11 and its aftermath.
We thank those who rose up in the wake of the worst attack our country has seen on American soil, everyone from those heroes who entered the Twin Towers to save lives at great risk to their own to all who volunteered to serve when our country needed them.
We thank the city, and other event hosts, for their continued efforts to make sure that those who died are not forgotten.
Events such as these are more than a remembrance: They are a promise and a vow to the fallen, to the families and to those who worked to make our world safer: We will not forget.
Breeze editorial