9/11: My Message of Rememberance and Peace (Plus Some Choice Words from Carl Sagan)

for me, 9/11 is about remembering the victims and their families, but also about remembering the brave first responders and random acts of courage between strangers that happened on this day, september 11th, many years ago now.

may the moments of courage and overwhelming humanity - both seen and unseen - that occurred on that day remind us of the incomparable ability for our human spirit to triumph over hatred, evil and destruction.

may we never forget, but may we all...worldwide...learn from this tragedy to move in the direction of peace and unity. in the midst of all this, i always have to stop and remind myself that, since the beginning of mankind, we've been drawing lines on maps and then arguing over them. but, if you actually look at the earth, there are no lines. we just made them up.

to further put this into perspective, i leave you all with the brilliant Carl Sagan's famous words about this "pale, blue dot" that is our planet:

"From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

Peace, Love & Progress,

Daria