The tragedies of Pearl Harbor and the World Trade Center remind us that "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."

America suffered a disastrous 911 emergency call on Tuesday morning 9-11-01. At the moment of the first attack, my wife was on the phone scheduling an appointment with her eye doctor. The office subscribes to a service that switched her call, while on hold, to a local radio station just as it reported an airplane had crashed into the World Trade Center. We immediately turned on the TV at home, and for the rest of the day we watched as the disaster unfolded. The horrendous loss of life exceeds that of our nation's most memorable earlier disaster, Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. President Roosevelt rightly said, this will be "a date which will live in infamy." The same is true for Nine Eleven Zero One.

Polls taken before Pearl Harbor indicated America was a third-rate power and that the American public was 70% against intervention in a foreign war. December 7, 1941, changed all that, and September 11, 2001, has changed everything also, including our psyche. We no longer are complacent, nor do we take our affluence and safety for granted.

Along with others who have paid with their blood, may the casualties of 9-11-01 and the heroism this terrible event evoked become everlasting memorials reminding us that "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."

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Forrest F. Gesswein Jr. was initiated in Mt. Mariah Lodge No. 116, Towson, Maryland, in May 1942 and received the rest of his Blue Lodge Degrees in 1943 while convalescing in the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda. Bro. Gesswein is a member of Boumi Temple Shrine, Baltimore, Maryland, and the Scottish Rite Bodies of Baltimore.