9/11 Thoughts

I want to post, but it's hard to come up with suitable material on the five year anniversary of 9/11. I don't know that I have anything useful to add to the national discourse, and my own continued feelings of loss and fear and anger and frustration aren't any larger or smaller today than they were yesterday or will be tomorrow just because of the date.

I think we all knew five years ago that the attacks would change things, but I don't think I correctly anticipated exactly what would change and what wouldn't. I think I felt like the fear would go on and on, but acute fear doesn't have much of a shelf-life - even with the Republicans deliberately trying to whip us into a frenzy at every opportunity, even now that we can't take lotion or purell on airplanes, the national mood seems from my layperson's perspective to be no more terrified than it was five years ago yesterday. If I were to guess, with no actual statistical analysis, what are the largest threats to my family's well-being today, I'd rank the neighborhood crack dealers and local idiot drivers much higher than Al Queda (although I may be more of a danger to the other drivers than they are to me, there seems to have been a surge in driving stupidity around here lately and I'm contemplating strapping a rocket launcher to my front bumper). You just can't hold fear in the front of your mind and maintain any quality of life.

That's not to say that I don't think we should do what makes sense to try to prevent future attacks. What makes sense to me, though, may not be what makes sense to someone else (for example, President Bush). One of the memories from 9/11 that most surprises me is that I actually thought well of Bush's initial public statements and strong front. I'm not proud of that now, but it's true - he felt like a leader to me, for just a minute, and maybe a uniting force. That just goes to show how much this administration has squandered. If someone like ME was willing to rally behind him in 2001, Bush's star was truly high, and now it seems that only the truly uninformed and/or blindly zealous agree with his foreign policy. When I consider that there are people in the world who hate America so deeply they are willing to kill themselves if it will hurt us, I don't see that deliberately engendering still more hatred is the answer. Acting like the bully many around the world already consider us to be can not possibly be making us more safe.

My oldest son was 4 months old on 9/11, and I remember sobbing and looking into his innocent face and wondering what I had done, bringing him into a world so off kilter. I've had three more children since then, and although I can't help moments of worry about what the world will be like by the time they're my age, I try to focus more on enjoying life with them now and teaching them as well as I can to live fairly and in balance with others. I want them to grow up with hope instead of fear. Besides being a better, happier way to live, it seems like a better tribute to those who died on 9/11 than returning hatred with hatred and violence with violence.