Seven years

HH is only five, or already five depending on how you look at it. He arrived two years after that morning in 2001.

When the doctor told us his due date was September 11th neither of us said a word, we just looked at each other and fiddled with our hands in our laps. We lived in lower Manhattan then, saw it all with our naked eyes, smelled it, tasted it, lived it and no doubt have some of it buried deep inside.

A great deal has happened in the last seven years; the war is still raging, the war that feels more and more like the permanent war of “1984” and our country, what a beating it has taken, and is taking and seems destined to go on taking. The liars are in charge and the desperate deceived have forgotten how to tell truth from fiction and lost the will to even try. They cheer and chant and wave flags and have learned to hate those who challenge their beliefs rather than respect the competition of ideas.

I don’t recall a time in my life when I was more disheartened at the likely choice of the majority. The re-election of Richard Nixon was a low-point and yet even then I didn’t have the feeling that his being in office actually jeopardized the very existence of the nation. Things are different now. We live in a far more dangerous world, an angrier world and a more complex world. America has always been a beacon of hope and promise but the current administration has transformed that beacon into a target and today we find ourselves one of the least trusted nations on the planet.

I actually despair at the idea of Senator McCain ascending to the Presidency. I don’t doubt that he believes he will do what is best for the country. I don’t believe he would intentionally put the nation at risk, but I am certain he will do just that. President Bush has poisoned our democracy. Through eight years of chipping away at the fundamental principles of our commonweal, he has left the nation divided, angry and fearful in mind and spirit and he has both hardened the resolve of our enemies and dramatically increased their ranks.

McCain will almost certainly involve America in another war, either through provoking it by bellicose posturing of the type he is practicing today with respect to Georgia and Iran, or through a knee-jerk response to a provocation that is designed to elicit just such a response. 9/11 was all about dragging us into a ground war in the Middle East and the monsters who planned and executed those attacks have been successful beyond their dreams. Can you imagine how quickly the situation could deteriorate if McCain is the man making decisions about how to respond to the next one? It is a very short step from the battlefields on which we are now engaged, to a war that engulfs the entire planet.

I believe the situation is that grave, the stakes that high, and the outcome of this election that important. But the thing that bothers me the most is that the country is divided into bunkers of hard right and hard left. It’s no accident that “country first” was the slogan of the Republican Convention. It’s no secret that we are a divided nation and that those divisions have crusted over into chasms during the last eight years. Our ideological blinders are firmly in place, fellow citizens who hold different beliefs are now enemies and the spin-doctors of the respective parties are engaged in campaigns of half-truths, outright misrepresentation and desperate fluff. The country is dancing in the darkness toward its demise. We are in the deep shit, and if I was Howard Dean I would be on the phone day and night to every person I knew of honor or merit or distinction, pleading with them to get out into the streets to educate, mobilize and energize the electorate. This may be the last chance we have to change our nation’s course before that course is chosen for us.

On this, the seventh anniversary of that morning in September, we should all try to remember what life was like before the terror. Ours was not a perfect nation on September 10th 2001 but it was a better one.

9/11

If you were on the southern end of Manhattan that morning and survived, that day has branded your memory with images that will only fade when you have. I expect there are thousands of New Yorkers and others who will wake up this morning and do as I did; they will go to their windows and search the sky. I have done it every September 11^th since that morning and when I do, it all comes back to me.

Everyone has a story, just as everyone who heard Franklin Roosevelt deliver his “Day which will live in Infamy” address to Congress on December 8, 1941, or heard Walter Cronkite deliver the tear-filled news that JFK had been assassinated or survived the rising swell of the Tsunami as it cut its deadly path through the shallow waters of the Thai coastline on December 26, 2004, bringing wave after wave of death to those in its path, will remember and have a story about those days, stories set in the unreal afterglow that follows the recognition of inconceivable horror.

I was walking home. I had run into the streets near my apartment after receiving a call from my wife, who was standing on the thirtieth floor of a building to one side of the World Trade Center complex. She had seen a huge fire and debris and ash were already dusting her windows. Shortly after she put down the phone the second plane passed directly by her and she watched as the skin of the aircraft was peeled back like a piece of silver fruit as it entered the building and exploded. When I was almost home I came upon a group of mothers standing near a playground, they were huddled together talking. As I passed them I turned for one last look at the fires that were towering above us and as I did I saw it fall, it just fell into itself as if it were made of sand and in its place a terrible cloud arose that would soon make its way to our streets, settling on our skin, in our hair and lodging somewhere permanently in our hearts. Some of the mothers shrieked, all of them gathered up their children and ran. We were in no immediate danger but no one knew that. The shocks had come so rapidly that morning, one unbelievable pounding after another and for weeks after almost any unusual sound would cause people to jerk noticeably and look up.

I do it even now, still search the sky, particularly when they are perfect blue and clear as they were that morning, as I did this morning.