Two Decades On

Time, we've often heard, is the great healer and I suspect when we're speaking about bruised romantic feelings or literal and figurative scraped knees, that's more often true than not but time does not, and cannot, heal all wounds.

This Saturday is the twentieth anniversary of the September 11th attacks, perhaps one of, if not, the darkest and saddest days in our collective consciousness and history. 

What we each most remember of September 11 is usually linked to where we were and what we were doing when at 8:46 AM, American Airlines Flight 11 smashed into the north face of the North Tower of the World Trade Center at over 450 miles an hour, becoming the sonata in a symphony of hate and horror that was to be redeemed by heroism and humanity as that day dragged on and for every day, up to, and including, today.

I don't think it likely that any of us have or will ever forget but learning to live as individuals and citizens of what we so casually call the Greatest Country on Earth, requires we show compassion towards one another and empathy for ideas and ideals like, and sometimes very much unlike, our own, and to display the courage of our convictions in order to live as bravely as those who died in New York City, the Pentagon and aboard Flight 93 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. 

We have gone down so many different and diverging paths in the last twenty years and our headlines and news stories reflect, perhaps uncomfortably and far too accurately, the "Pluribus" in our "E Pluribus Unum." I'm not sure how or when we became the too-often querulous and stridently unhappy people we far too often seem to be every time I click on a video clip or open a newspaper.

We may be speaking more often, more angrily, and more loudly than we have at any time since the divisiveness preceding the Civil War, but I fear we're also choosing to not listen even more to one another than, if not at any time in our history, at least in my lifetime.

A cautionary and prophetic historical footnote, from September 10, 2001, about a Gallup Poll released on that day, indicating 55% of us were 'dissatisfied with the way things are going in the United States.' 

I don't pretend to know what recent surveys on that subject might reveal, but based on the mutterings and murmurings we each encounter every day, I have little doubt that the anger and dissatisfaction levels are at least as elevated as they were the day before 9/11.

World Trade Towers picture of faces of those who died

Somehow we went from a moment of grief-fueled unity two decades ago to an ever-escalating unending argument not just on who we are as a nation and how we should be better, to a scorched-earth devil-take-the-hindmost intractability on nearly every aspect of our lives. 

We not only refuse to acknowledge the other's point of view we dismiss their perspective as "fake news" and are proud of how our ignorance is just as valid as their knowledge. How can we ever hope to have a shared future when we refuse to overcome our divisive present?

And that desire for a better future for all of us should animate our dialogue and drive the decisions and efforts that are at the essence of who we are as the nation regarded as a shining light for all others and as a people whose belief in ourselves and in our fundamental goodness and righteousness has taken us from one coast to the other, from the darkest depths of the world's oceans and to farthest reaches and starless nights of space. 

We must promise one another that the memories of all those whose lives ended on 9/11 will fuel our efforts to lead our country, and the world, to greater freedoms that more truly and always honor their sacrifice. 
-bill kenny