A Pathway to Remembrance

Harry Dunham Park is situated at the southwest corner of Somerville Road and Church Street, in the Liberty Corner section of Basking Ridge. It has soccer and baseball fields, a children’s playground, wide expanses of lawn and excellent walking paths. It’s close to our home, and my wife and I like to exercise there.

The walkways intersect a small pavilion which sits in the middle of the park: There, under an American flag, is a commemorative plaque inscribed with the phrase, “A Place to Remember.” It is affixed to a steel beam taken from the ruins of the Twin Towers. Tributes to some of the brave souls who perished on 9/11 are inscribed on individual slates set into the earth. No one who walks by this resting place of memories can forget what happened. We hope that it will never happen again.

But it irritates me to call to mind the Fort Dix Six, who are described in a recent newspaper story as “radical Islamists,” whose motives allegedly led them into a plot to kill loyal American servicemen and women. I’m just as troubled by the attitudes of certain of their friends and relatives in America, as well as in the Balkans, some of whom are reported to be in deep denial about this intercepted suicide attack.

These are the mindsets that we in America, as well as our children, will need to endure and to defend against, perhaps for decades to come.