Each of us can remember where we were and what we were doing five years ago today. We are the fortunate ones; we were not fighting for our lives. But no matter if you were a mother of a slain fire fighter, the wife of a businessman who never returned home, the child of a soldier who spent his last day at the Pentagon, or just an American, it affected us all.

We had just moved to West Virginia early September 2001 and my room did not even have a bed in it yet. I was sitting cross-legged on a futon, desperately trying to catch up on work that had piled up during the move, when a little news box popped up in my AOL Instant Messenger program saying a plane had hit the World Trade Center.

That’s all it said. Nothing more, nothing less. I spent a moment trying to remember where in the world the WTC was. Oh yeah, New York City. Then I tried to figure out why AOL would interrupt me with such trivial news when it had nothing to report except that one sentence.

A click and the window was gone as I resumed my work. I was soon called to the television and learned the awful truth of what was going on.

I think my state of unawareness and disinterest was indicative of the rest of our country’s attitude on September 10th, 2001. Since then we have grieved and gone after our enemies. But in the middle of the fight on terror, I think we have forgotten more than a little. We are all guilty: politicians on both sides are politicizing it, newscasters are hiding the terrible video footage, and the average Joes – you and me – are forgetting it as our lives take over.

People died. Americans died. They died because there are people in this world who rather than hash things out like reasonable, civilized human beings will kill innocent people in brutal ways. The Muslim’s attack our country did not start on 9/11 but that was when we received our wakeup call. And we are beginning to go back to sleep.

It’s been 5 years. It’s time to do something those who died that day cannot: remember.