On this 10th Anniversary of 9/11, I can only remember two tragedies, and the difficulty, indeed the impossibility, of speaking of both together.
When that awful morning came, a friend called and said, simply, "Turn on the television." And we did. And ss we are three hours behind New York , in the Mountain Time Zone, sufficient time had elapsed for the television commentators to know what we were witnessding: a terrorist tragedy.
For me, the great tragedy visited on those almost 3000 individuals in New York, Washington, D.C. and Pennsylvania is forever caught in scenes of couples, holding hands-and individuals too-jumping to their death. What else can we say about such an awful but brave death by people entirely innocent of what befell them?
The second tragedy cannot be really spoken of in the same breath, but, for me at least, I must.
This was the decision, many months later, to invade Iraq, and the awful decline into the national insanity of a war that need not have happened, but did, and the many, ways, that needless, foolish war led us to our subsequent national decline into a state of fear, a decline that has changed us, and our democracy, but hopefully not forever. That decision led to the deaths of thousand of American GI, many thousands of Iraqi soldiers, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians.
How can we think of politics today and tomorrow without seeing how much of our steep fall into domestic political warfare is traceable to what happened at the Twin Towers, and to what we chose to make of it, a decision for war that led us all into a suicide leap toward democratic decline?