Four years ago, I took a taxi tour of Belfast with my family.  The taxi driver, who grew up in the Shankill Road area, took us to the Peace Wall and invited my children to sign it with a Sharpie marker.  As my young daughter added her autograph to the thousands of signatures on the barricade, we adults talked about the violence that plagued Belfast for so many decades.  The taxi driver told us that every single person he knew - every one - had either been personally harmed or had a family member or close friend who'd suffered.

"I think we Americans can understand this a little bit," I told him, "because I don't know anyone, anywhere in the country, who either didn't lose someone on September 11 or knows someone who did."  I'm not sure our taxi driver got what I was saying, but I definitely understood his point.  Large-scale tragic events affect everyone, and they change a country forever.

Eight years ago, I watched towers fall and airplanes crash.  I stood outside in eerie silence, wishing for the familiar noise of planes flying over my home.  I cried for my husband's friends, lost in the attack on the Pentagon, and for my uncle's colleagues who died in the collapse of the World Trade Center.  As the rubble settled and the dust cleared, I realized that I truly did not know anyone who was completely outside the effects of the terrorists' attacks.  Everyone I knew lost someone, or knew someone who had.

In my mind, the effects of September 11, 2001 go beyond those of many other tragic days in our nation's recent history.  People over a certain age remember the precise moment they learned that President Kennedy had been shot, and our nation mourned the loss of a young and dynamic leader.  Many of us remember the assassination attempt on President Reagan; we recall praying and worrying and wondering what would happen if The Worst happened.

When The Worst really happened, we were caught by surprise.  An attack on our own country, on innocent citizens who were just doing their jobs, just working to support their families and protect their nation, changed us forever.

Or did it?

I believe that we're now far enough removed in time from September 11 that we are in danger of forgetting that we lost thousands of citizens in an unprovoked attack on our territory.  Yes, there are memorials, but how many of us attend them?  How many of us look at ourselves each September and ask if we've done enough to protect our country, to teach our children that the words "the land of the free and the home of the brave" don't just apply to soldiers and sailors and firefighters and police officers, but to all of us?

For several years, my husband worked at the Pentagon, in the very office spaces in which his friends died eight years ago today.  Our government can't afford to seal off an entire section of the Pentagon as a memorial - those offices were renovated after the attack.  I can't imagine going to work every day, knowing your office was in the Pentagon's Ground Zero, knowing your friends lost their lives right there because terrorists hate the U.S.  I can't imagine walking past New York City's Ground Zero or that quiet field in Pennsylvania every day, either.

Our nation needs to remember this day.  Not just in New York City, Shanksville and Arlington, but everywhere.  We must gather and read the names of those killed on that other September day.  We must fly our flags and stand silently together.  We must teach our children that our country is, indeed, the land of the free and the home of the brave, and we must do our part to show our sons and daughters that the words "honor" and "duty" mean something.  We need to do this not just for them, but for ourselves as well.

"Remember the Alamo!"  "Remember Pearl Harbor!"  These battle cries inspired us to fight to hold what was ours, to defend liberty in the name of those who gave their lives in the name of freedom.

 Will we, twenty or thirty or fifty years from now, truly remember September 11?