Twenty-five years after a generational milestone attack on America it was a new generation of youth that voiced powerful recognition of lessons learned and a fresh call to unity and compassion.
Killeen ISD hosted the 20th anniversary community Freedom Walk Friday, the 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks that halted a nation for a moment before hardening a resolve to stand as one in the face of a new enemy.
At this year’s local event at Harker Heights High School, senior Jaylynn Bennett brought poignant words of challenge and remembrance, calling on her peers as well as those who remember the day the towers fell to end the continuing cycle of violence in the country.
During the ceremony inside the school auditorium, the Crimson Belles dance team, Harker Heights choir and Junior ROTC provided performance and introduced the program. A KISD video featuring the school board officers told the history from local perspectives.
For the first time, the district conducted a middle school essay contest and Union Grove Middle School eighth-grader Elizabeth Vanderburg won the contest and read her entry.
“The prompt was about how they showed the ideals of what America was built on and that was what I wanted to get across,” she said following the ceremony.
“The best way we can honor the heroes of 911 is by putting aside our difference and working together,” she said, voicing her favorite part of her essay.
Fort Hood representatives provided a prayer and greetings to the assembled community, which included a large group of police, fire and other emergency providers, as well as soldiers, military veterans and Gold Star Family members.
It was Bennett, Vanderburg and other current students who drew the loudest, longest applause from the grateful audience.
Bennett described the horror of twin towers reduced to rubble 25 years ago, and the four plane crashes that took 2,977 lives in New York, Washington, D.C. and Pennsylvania.
“Today marks a heavy milestone,” she said. “As I look at my peers I am reminded of the truth. We were not alive that day. For our generation, 911 can feel like a chapter in a history book. A moment becomes history when it is remembered. It becomes legacy when someone chooses to carry it forward.”
She asked audience members who remember that day to raise their hand and spoke to the younger people in the crowd.
“What happens when the hands that remembered are no longer here? One day the responsibility of remembering will belong entirely to our generation. I want us to know why it mattered.”
For many youths in Central Texas, she said, the echo of 911 is heard daily in the military families like her own. “The trauma of the war lives in our hallways, in our homes, in the quiet painful moments of the veterans’ grief.”
She called on her peers to display compassion and respect for others, especially toward people like teachers who encourage and prepare students for the future.
“Tragedy has a powerful way of bringing us together,” she said. “We became a canvas of unity. Why does it take tragedy for us to love one another? Why does it take darkness for us to appreciate the life?”
Hate and fear continue, she said, allowing division to tear apart the country. “We hold the power to change and to stop the cycle of violence,” she said. “Love, unity and human connection are our greatest defenses against hatred and fear.”
It falls to the next generation of dreamers, she said, to build a bridge between a history shaped by sacrifice and a future written in hope.
“We must be architects of healing. I see the next generation of dreamers who choose kindness over bullying, reject violence and build a world where we can work together every day.”
Following the ceremony in the auditorium, audience members walked together to the school stadium and gathered to honor the fallen as the Killeen Fire Department sounded a bell and a student trumpeter played Tapps.
Photos from the 20th annual KISD Freedom Walk as well as various campus freedom events are posted at www.killeenisd.org/photos