I take too many things for granted. In the face of Tuesday’s tragedy on the East Coast, this becomes even clearer to me.

As the dust settles and we realize what has happened and what we have lost, we have to take into account what this atrocity means to our country and to each of us.

My dad travels to Washington, D.C., fairly often on business trips. He was scheduled to be at the Pentagon next week. As I ran around campus Tuesday morning, I found excuses not to call home to verify that Dad was in fact not traveling this week. I didn’t want to deal with what could have happened if he were in D.C.

Had the acts of terrorism occurred just a few days later, or had my dad flown out this week instead of next, my life would have changed forever. I would have lost my father in this act of madness.

It should not take such an extreme act of violence against our country – against the only country most of us have ever lived in, the only way of life many of us have ever had to know – to make me appreciate what I have in my life.

Our generation has never had to deal with or even think of such a tragedy occurring right here in the States.

Such a grand-scale attack against our country would have been brushed off as unthinkable even a week ago.

People my age played with toy soldiers as children, but have never had to live with the ravaging effects of war on our own country. In other countries, children do not need to play with toys to envision what it is like to live in a war-torn world.

We have never had to consider what it would be like to have to live in such a place; we are able to take our freedom for granted.

Do not let this tragedy pass you by without realizing the horrific effects it could have, and realize the things we as Americans can take for granted each day.

Take comfort in what we still have, and appreciate the things this country can provide for us. But do not be fooled that just because we are many states away from the tragedy that this will not affect our lives.

Now our country must face one of the biggest horrors, something so unthinkable many of us could not believe or comprehend the news of what had happened when we first heard it.

In a world that works in such chance ways, we must keep an eye on what is constant in our lives – loved ones, our own strengths and happiness, a country strong enough to recuperate from this mayhem.

Let us come out of this with a stronger love for any we have lost, and the ability to pull close those that remain.

Things will change now. Perhaps not our lives, but at least our way of life. None of us can walk away from this wholly unaffected.

People dear to you could have been taken, if that is not already the case. Our lives could have been altered in a way we can’t grasp.

My heart goes out to everyone harmed in any way by this tragedy. May those lost rest in peace. May the rest of us never bear witness to such horrors again. And may we, at least, be able to band together to recover from our loss, and praise what and who we still have with us.

Cavan Reagan is a junior in journalism and mass communication and English from Bellevue, Nebraska. He is the research assistant for the Daily.