After Sept. 11, 2001, Americans took an active role in their most important asset; each other. Churches were filled with the faithful and faith-needing looking for the light at the end of the tunnel.
Civil servants were treated as royalty and given respect that had been lost in events such as the Los Angeles riots.
Sullivan County Sheriff Wayne Anderson said that funding after Sept. 11 was no problem. Anderson spoke of this as he was fighting for more funds with the Sullivan County Commission this summer.
Lee Fish and her husband Scott started planning a Sept. 11 event last November to be held this Thursday on the tarmac of Tri-Cities Airport. Both believed that funding for the event would come easily enough through donations.
Now less than a week before the event, they are still almost $3,000 short of making the money needed for the event.
Fish said that many people have not wanted to give even small amounts to help the program. A local talk radio show host even told her that he would not advertise it because another radio station had already volunteered to do the event.
Fish’s inspiration for the event came of course from the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11 and from her father, who was a police officer in Kentucky. She wants to localize the event so that the citizens of Eastern Tennessee can realize the full and lasting magnitude of the attacks.
A four-foot piece of one of the planes that hit the World Trade Center towers, with an imprint of a body on it, will be at the event. Fish believes this will show observers who have not seen the wreckage in New York, Pennsylvania or Washington, D.C., that this was worse than it could ever be portrayed on TV.
Families, economy and public policy, among a plethora of others, are charged daily by the thought of another day like Sept. 11, 2003.
Lee believes we should remember and pay tribute to those who have been martyred on the rock of freedom.
If Lee could pass along one sentiment to the public it would be to remember, sacrifice and pay tribute to those who have served without recognition.

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