Yes, we now pay greater attention to the Islamic world, striving hard to better understand it. That the suffering seemingly was in vain-that no lasting good has yet come from it. The second essential ingredient: futility. Inevitability is so reassuring because, inevitably, it absolves us from responsibility. But 9/11 was not inevitable it was preventable. The inevitable, no matter how horrible, no matter how painful, at least offers the solace that it was beyond our control, beyond our wisdom, beyond what could be expected from us. Perhaps the answer is that this was a real tragedy, and real tragedy has two indispensable components. What is it about this tragedy that makes it different? It is not merely because so many people died a horrible death, because so many die in so many horrible ways every day. Nearly every barbarism and almost every crime is committed by those who believe themselves to have been somehow injured. They are an object lesson for all of us: Being too sure, being too certain that one is absolutely right and everyone else is completely wrong leads to much pain and great sorrows. They wanted justice and in pursuing what they thought to be justice, committed horrific crimes. Rather, they were evil in the classic Judeo-Christian-Islamic sense: They were twisted in their goodness. The killers were not evil in a Manichean sense: They were not the opposite of good. September 11 had nothing to do with a threat to freedom it had everything to do with justice, albeit a distorted sense of justice. Mischaracterizing the killers as “hating our freedom” did a great injustice to the dead. So many of them still shaking their self-righteous fingers and using this tragedy to curtail liberty and provoke violence in places that have nothing to do with 9/11. They are forgetful of the loss of these innocents, and forgetful of all those left behind who miss their fathers and mothers and spouses and children.Īnd on the Right, it is no better. On the Left, many shook their self-righteous fingers and said that while it was a tragedy, what else could you expect when the United States is so belligerent and domineering? Many on the Left are too ready to find an excuse for any crime committed. The tragedy of their dying was corrupted from the very start by our leaders who failed to understand why they died and who used their dying for their own objectives.

The dead deserve to be remembered, to be honored, to be missed.

I sometimes still worry that all the publicity centering around 9/11 drowns out the cries of those who died that day. It is a terrible realization to know that a child born in 2001 is now old enough to die on the endless battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq. Instead, our policies and actions over the last two decades have enabled that which we sought to vanquish to metastasize. We never even got the chance (as was the case with Vietnam) to move on to new crises and new enemies. We never got that cathartic release that comes with victory. But I haven’t been distracted I haven’t moved on. We have an urgent yearning to be distracted and to move on. For us, nineteen years is a very long time. Our collective attention span is notoriously short, and we prefer to flit from issue to issue, from crusade to crusade. nineteen years on and the sound of those towers crashing down still echoes through our country, and the silence of those dead still haunts those of us still living. Even the pain of the Vietnam War, which had haunted and hounded us as a nation for so many years, was hardly felt in 1992 as we continued our unseemly victory lap for “winning” the Cold War, and the Fall of the Wall drowned out all other voices in our ears. Instead, the “missiles of October” were lost in the fog of our collective memory, and we were caught in the throes of the Iran crisis and a greater crisis of self-confidence. In October 1979, few of us reflected on those frightening days nineteen years earlier when we came closest to annihilating our species. Although we swore we might “forgive, but never forget,” we had moved on as a nation, far more obsessed with the space race (Sputnik hovered menacingly overhead) and the arms race (that mythical missile gap). And there is no better way to honor these dead than to work humbly and honestly for a more just world.īy December 7, 1958, the day that would “live in infamy” was a distant memory. We believe this because it is part of our continuing duty and responsibility to those who died. But we should resolve that these dead did not die in vain. We live in a broken world we live in a broken time.

Hope fragments meaning