(September 13, 2020 / JNS) The 19th anniversary of 9/11 has been the nation’s darkest in this dreaded cycle.

The Black Lives Matter (BLM) riots that attacked the statues of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Christopher Columbus and Abraham Lincoln did not spare 9/11 memorials.

The statue of a police officer was beheaded and toppled in  Plymouth, Mass. at a 9/11 memorial honoring those who had died in the attacks. But the 2,000 pound steel beam from the World Trade Center proved beyond the ability of the vandals to topple.

When BLM racists defaced statues and memorials in the Boston Common, including the “Glory” regiment, they didn’t spare the 9/11 memorial in the Public Garden.

A 9/11 memorial honoring five fallen firefighters was defaced and the American flagpole was cut down in Washingtonville, N.Y. There was also vandalism at the Decatur, Ill. memorial site, and a red, white and blue rearing horse 9/11 memorial in Rochester, N.Y. was smeared with red paint.

Beyond the radical attacks on the monuments of September 11 were the attacks on its heroes.

The NYPD has suffered its worst days since 9/11, with over 400 officers injured in the BLM riots. Police and firefighters went from the heroes of a nation to being smeared as soulless monsters.

“I could see no difference between the officer who killed and the police who died, or the firefighters who died,” wrote Ta-Nehisi Coates, an intellectual godfather of BLM. “They were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were the menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could—with no justification—shatter my body.”

“Between the World and Me,” the hateful tract in which Coates dehumanized the police officers and firefighters who had died trying to save people of all races and creeds, became a bestseller, was a Pulitzer finalist and has repeatedly shown up on corporate anti-racism reading lists.

All of this makes commemorating Sept. 11 into an awkward task that Democrats avoid.