Seventeen years have passed since that crisp September morning when airliners fell like ripe apples out of a cloudless sky.

This fall’s crop of senior class students, from Seneca Valley to South Butler to Slippery Rock, would have been newborns, or nearly-born, when the twisted acolytes of Osama bin Laden commandeered four commercial airliners as they departed airports in Boston and Newark, N.J.

The passage of 17 years means that every child who was alive on 9/11 is out of the public schools now; likewise, every child in the public schools is too young the have even the most fleeting of memory of the 9/11 atrocity — and yet they have lived their entire lives in a nation that has been in a constant state of war for 17 years.

This realization should make us mindful of a few important realities.

- First, let’s not forget to dwell on what exactly happened Sept. 11, 2001. Today is a good day for parents, grandparents and others to review the history and its importance.

The hijackers crashed two of the four flights into the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center, collapsing them. A third plane hit the Pentagon in suburban Washington, D.C.

The fourth plane, United Airlines Flight 93, left Newark at 8:42 a.m. and flew practically directly over Butler before four hijackers turned it around and headed for Washington, presumedly the U.S. Capitol. Nobody knows the exact details, but there’s ample evidence that some of the 34 passengers plotted to storm the cockpit in an attempt to thwart the four hijackers. The Boeing 757-200 crashed in a reclaimed strip mine near Shanksville in Somerset County, Pa. All 40 people aboard died, along with the four hijackers.

Today and every Sept. 11, the names of more than 3,000 people are read aloud to commemorate the Americans who died that day in New York, Washington and Shanksville. At a national memorial in Somerset County, a new wind chime tower will be dedicated. The 93-foot-tall aluminum “Tower of Voices” features a chime for each of the 40 people who died aboard United Flight 93.

- Second, we honor the memory of those who died that day, and the sacrifice of those who have served the military in the succeeding years in the war against extremism. It has been a difficult battle, in large part because of the difficulty in defining and isolating the enemy and the enemy’s objectives. He has no uniform, geographic boundaries, official flag or recognized government. The global war on terror is now the longest-running armed conflict ever engaged in by the United States military.

An estimated 10,000 Americans have died globally in the conflict and 56,400 were wounded, according to a compilation of government and public records.

The International medical organizations estimate total deaths from the global war ranging from 1.3 million to 2 million. Joshua Goldstein, an international relations professor at American University, says that’s fewer war deaths than in any other decade in the past century.

We should honor the memory of the fallen from the standpoint that peace is our ultimate objective. By reminding our children, we also remind ourselves that a wartime footing does not need to be the constant status quo, even though it is the only status the schoolchildren have ever known.

- Finally, let’s keep in mind that history is an imperfect discipline. At best it is a mosaic, made complete by the bits and pieces of our collective recall and experience. Consider three second-graders, all 8 years old, each from a different era: one from 1941, who learned by radio about the Pearl Harbor bombing in 1941, and would be 85 today; one from 1963 who watched as Walter Cronkite announced the assassination of President Kennedy, who would now be 64; and one from Sept. 11, 2001, who watched the WTC towers collapse during the live CNN broadcast. She would be 25 today. Each would have a vivid memory, and valid emotions about what 9/11 meant to them.

It might seem like a small point of detail that a new generation of Americans is too young to know first-hand about one of the most seminal atrocities in our nation’s history. The older generations share a collective responsibility to paint them an accurate picture of what happened.

— TAH