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YouTube Gold: Ray Charles, In Honor Of 9/11

An elegant performance to honor a day of loss and heroism

By JD King
US-ATTACKS-9/11-ANNIVERSARY-FLIGHT93
People visit the ‘Tower of Voices’- Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania on May 26, 2021. - Gordon Felt knows the old mining land in Pennsylvania where United Airlines Flight 93 crashed on September 11, 2001, by heart. He’s been there about a hundred times since the attacks. His brother Edward was on the plane that went down in wooded hills outside Shanksville after passengers stopped hijackers from crashing it into Washington, DC, 155 miles
Photo by ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images

Twenty years is a long time so we know some of you are too young to remember what happened on 9/11/2001.

It was possible for a few minutes to think that maybe the first plane was an accident but when the second hit the World Trade Center it was clearly an act of war. The third one crashed into the Pentagon and the fourth was headed for the White House or Capitol before the passengers heroically decided they would not allow that and chose their own means of death in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

What happened that day was in turns despicable and sick and then selfless, heroic and amazing.

So we’d like to dedicate today’s YouTube Gold to the brave men and women on Flight 93 and to the equally brave men and women who tried to save as many lives as they could in the World Trade Center as well as everyone who perished on that sorrowful morning and after.

In our day, we too often fall short when we look for the best in ourselves. Perhaps we could look back at those who accepted that they were about to die but chose to do as much good as possible in the short time they had left. They could never have done better. We still can and should. To sufficiently honor them, we must.

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