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We just marked, of course, the 23^rd anniversary of the September 11 attacks on New York City and the Pentagon. Everyone personally affected that day, whether victim or survivor, has a story to tell; some horrific and sorrowful, of course, but there are also many tales of kindness and courage, selflessness and generosity. Every one of those stories matters and must never be allowed to fade from our collective memory.

Amid all the musings and reminiscences posted yesterday and every anniversary about the world-changing impact of the 9/11 attacks, I considered adding my own observations. I considered stressing the sobering fact that the enemy who struck us on that day at the beating heart of the capitalist world’s economic center is still a global threat. Yes, United States Navy SEALs finally delivered justice to al Qaeda monster Osama bin Laden, but the jihadist ideology he represented still inflicts misery, murder, and mayhem upon its Western enemies at every opportunity. The ill-named War on Terror continues, and America and Israel – the Great Satan and the Little Satan – remain the principal enemies, in our time, of an Islamic supremacism that dates back 1400 years. Less than a year ago Israel suffered a 9/11 of its own when Hamas jihadists flooded into Israel and murdered approximately 1200 innocents with gleeful savagery.

But I decided to focus instead on a different sort of memorial on this anniversary by revising and reposting an article I wrote twelve years ago on the sadly now-defunct Acculturated website. That article was a commentary on a poignant 9/11 story related in the Stamford Advocate, a report that struck me as offering a hopeful insight about what used to be called the clash of civilizations, although it is more accurately viewed as the clash of civilization versus barbarism.

The story related how a family man named Randy Scott, trapped in the offices of Euro Brokers, Inc. in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, very near the impact of United Airlines Flight 175, jotted down this terse SOS on a piece of paper:

84th floor

West Office

12 people trapped

Presumably he released it from a window, because the note drifted from that 84th floor to the street below, where someone found it and gave it to a guard at the Federal Reserve Bank. The guard went to report the note, but the Tower in which Randy Scott and his co-workers waited for help collapsed.

The Federal Reserve kept the note and eventually turned it over to the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. The museum shared the note with the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of New York, which was finally able to trace it to Randy in the summer of 2011, thanks to a thumbprint-sized spot of blood on the note which DNA testing proved was his. This confirmation enabled the ME’s office to reach out to his wife.

Denise Scott learned of her husband’s message just ahead of the ten-year anniversary of the attacks. “I’m speechless that they actually were able to identify it,” Denise said. “This note was written on September 11. It came out of a window. Somebody had it. People had their hands all over it.”

All along, Denise and her three grown daughters had believed and hoped that Randy died instantly when the plane hit. The note was wrenching evidence that he had not. It changed not just Randy’s narrative, but that of the eleven other people referred to in the note; it was at least some closure for the Scott family, albeit tragic.

Denise allowed the National September 11 Memorial & Museum to exhibit the note. Jan Ramirez, chief curator of the museum, says it is

exceptionally rare. I don’t know of anything else like it. There have been other pieces of paper that came out of the towers that day, to which we have been able to attach some powerful stories, but none have been quite as rare and unusual and inspiring and sad and touching as this particular one. It really is in a class by itself.

“It tells people the story of the day,” Denise says.

My thought upon reading about this a dozen years ago in Connecticut’s Stamford Advocate was that the journey of Randy Scott’s note is one that could only take place in a country and a culture that affirms and reveres life, and that subconsciously understands the communal power of storytelling to carry our personal and public narratives forward even after death. It speaks volumes about Americans that every person who touched that note not only recognized its historic significance as a tiny fragment of that day’s tragic mosaic, but revered it enough to preserve it for ten years, unlock the mystery of its authorship, and transmit Randy’s voice through the years until he could speak one final time to his family, and then to others from a museum case.

The Islamic fundamentalists who struck America on September 11, 2001, just like the ones who struck Israel on October 7, 2023, proudly declare that they love death more than we love life. Having pledged themselves to a god of nihilism and hate, they crow ecstatically about the infidel blood they spill, like the Hamas terrorist who phoned his parents to boast excitedly about the ten Jews he slaughtered “with my own hands” on 10/7. They consider this a glorious victory. But a culture that prizes death so fanatically is already a dead one. In the long run, this barren culture of a hollowed-out humanity will wreak a great deal of havoc along the way, but ultimately cannot and will not prevail. In the grand scheme of things, it will go the way of all death cults, like the Aztecs.

Meanwhile, the Judeo-Christian culture that cherishes the gift of life, a culture that values each of our lives and each of our stories – like Randy Scott’s – points the way to a victory that is transcendent in a way the jihadists cannot even fathom. It is a culture of the celebration of life, not of death; a culture of creation, not of destruction. God has guaranteed us victory over the kind of temporal death which jihadists embrace. The horror of 9/11 must never be forgotten or minimized, and the war is not over, but in the long run the clash of civilization and barbarism has already been won.

Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior.