CLEVELAND — History is written with many voices, shot through many lenses, told from the many perspectives of the people who were the firsthand witnesses to it or unwilling participants in it.
From the people who woke up on a Tuesday morning in September of 2001 to go to work in New York City, to those who gathered on Dealey Plaza in November of 1963 to catch a glimpse of a president, to the rarely told but deeply held stories of our relatives who fought in war.
Every generation was deeply impacted at the time by those events, but the reality is, only a handful truly lived them.
This is different.
It is not something playing out in another part of the country or corner of the globe, it’s in our state, our city, our homes, our lives. We are not only firsthand witnesses, we are the principles in the story.
The common denominator of those past trials though is likely the very thing that will see us through this one, and that is the willingness and desire of all to come together as one.
So when Governor DeWine called on us Thursday to put out our flags he was invoking that spirit of all of us to remember the closeness we felt on September 12. A symbol that though we may be physically separated at this time, we still stand together as one.
We pray that years from now we look back at this as a period of great inconvenience that stopped a wildfire from spreading, but it’s already clear, at this early stage, 2020 will be a year forever remembered for the event that suspended life as we know it and the role we all played in it.
