Remembering 9/11
Members of the Yale and New Haven communities gathered on the Beinecke Plaza to mark the 13th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. J.J. Wilson '15, a veteran of the U.S. Army Special Forces, was among the students who took part. In his speech, Wilson described the troubling legacy of the attacks:
I'm terrified that the lives of my young children will be shaped within the context of a conflict for which we did not ask, a conflict for which we still have no answer. And I worry that this was what the bad guys had intended all along. In which case, I'm afraid that we’re allowing them to win. I don't know the right answer; I'm not even sure about the right questions. But it's our job to ask them—to continue to ask them, until we get it right. And as we stand here… together…in remembrance of those we lost both on that day and in years since…it is incumbent upon us, as a community, as a society, not only to pay tribute to those taken from us but also to cast an eye forward, to resolve that our history will not be written in blood …that our story will be one neither of terror nor of war…that within their lifetimes each of our children shall know peace.
