On the lampshade of a desklight in my office, I long ago placed a ceramic flag pin still attached to a piece of white cardboard given to us by our building management company after the attack that killed three thousand of our fellow Americans. It says, "September 11, 2001. We remember". It is just about six years since I put it there. I see it every morning when I turn on the light. Sometimes it registers. Sometimes it does not, as I sip my coffee and sit down to read the bevy of e-mails of the day.
Last night, I happened across a documentary that I had seen once before, the memories of people who survived that day, barely, in many cases, interspersed with video of the gaping hole and the glowering flames and the billowing smoke before we all knew exactly how bad it was. A fireman or policeman who survived the full weight of the collapsing north tower on him along with some 12 other people, one of them a disabled person he had helped carry down to the sixth floor, tried to makesense of his living while so many others died. They all did. They probably all still do.
I cried again at the devastation repeated in front of me. I know I am not the only one who saw it again, and wept.
And yet, here we are six years later, we citizens, seduced by our i-phones and HD TVs. We clamor and argue among ourselves in self-entitled smugness, about Bushies, or a "Fate Worse than Bush" as Harper's put it , in Rudy Giulani, or horror of horrors, a Hilary presidency. We think it can all be solved by simply staying out of the way of the radicals du jour who would kill us with a smile and put our bluetoothed heads on a stick. While we say we support our troops, we do everything we can to guarantee their failure with our bickering. The tragedy of each death is compounded by our lack of will, and a comcomitant lack of strategic direction, as if no one is listening and biding his time on the other side of the world. And those who claim they would lead us, fight each other for that small territory on Pennsylvania Avenue rather than a serious defense of liberty. Liberty costs. Just like Grace costs. And who among us wants to pay the price? It isn't like World War II, or, is it? The same things aren't at stake, or are they? Some people think that they are. Some don't. Most people would rather not think about it. Me, sometimes I am in all three camps, at different times, of course.
I noticed, driving to work today, that, in response to an Internet exhortation that we all demonstrate that we have not forgotten 9/11, about half of the cars had on their headlights in the broad daylight. I felt a certain pride in this small gesture. I did it myself. But what are we really ready for when we say we want to preserve our liberty and the liberty of the world? We say "We will never forget!" Some stations won't even show the images that I saw yesterday, a protective censorhip, to spare us pain. But pain helps us remember. "We will never forget!" Into what does that phrase translate?
Personally all I can do is pray for the change of the human heart that can only come from an Intercession of the Divine, that I will be shown the right thing, and do it when I see it. Everything else is just chatter and confusion.
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