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It has been four years

September 11, 2005

Do you remember your emotional state as the events of 9/11 unfolded?  Probably with a clarity reserved for few other things, no matter where you were.

I was … angry.  I knew US foreign policy, our long habit of supporting monsters who happen to be our temporary friends, was the cause.  The last four years have served up nothing to change that assessment.

I was … fascinated.  I never would have thought the towers would have fallen.  Structural disasters have always been an interest and that was a doozie.

I was also anxious – I knew it would result in a war and my assessment of the president’s intelligence was no comfort to say the least.  As Donald Rumsfeld might say; “you go to war with the idiot you have.”

Some time after that – I can’t remember when – I started reading John Hoke’s Asylum.  He lived in NYC at the time and watched it all happen, finally running from the clouds of smoke and dust, trying to find his girlfriend who is now his lovely wife.  He wrote movingly about his experiences and thoughts.  Today he writes about how memory has frozen images as a series of stills. 

…No. Motion. Just. Single. Frames. Like a child’s flip book, my memory needs a thumb to flip the corner of the pages to put things in motion…

Memory is so deeply mysterious and fascinating – the plasticity of the routine and the deeply etched clarity of traumatic events.  He concludes in rememberance of the dead, the injured, and all of us.

In the last four years my feelings have come to include an abiding sadness at the deep division in our country and in the world.  In particular, the radical Muslim and radical Christian world are hard at work trying to define each other as inhuman, beyond understanding and unworthy of making the effort to work something out.  That the blood of the hateful will be spilt is a given, but in the battle the field of destruction radiates out like ripples in a pond to flow around the innocent.  And yes, most Americans, and most people in principally Muslim countries, are innocent of this conflict.

Go read the whole post at John Hoke’s Asylum: September 11, 2005.

Here are some more:

  • Orac recalls with fresh outrage his discovery that some people really genuinely hate America, with some thoughts thrown in about Ward Churchill.

  • Les over at SEB just says briefly; “I understand now” to the many people who recall traumatic international events of their lives, and calls for rememberence.
  • Cajun shares a clip that expresses how he felt about the event, the wars that have followed, and a jeremiad against the American Left.
  • UTI shares the thoughts of Alon Levy, a 17-year-old who will help you feel much better if you worry that the young are not paying attention to the world around them.
  • ***Dave walks quietly through a far deeper Christian meditation about 9/11 than the thundering sermons dominating the Christian landscape since then.
  • More as they come in
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