9-11 Plus Seven

Today's seventh commemoration of the terrorist attacks of 2001 are no less a time for remembrance than they are of grief. That day of shock and horror still casts a long shadow over our nation and world seven Septembers later. We remember because we can't help it and we grieve because we must.

We remember our stupification at what was happening. We remember the dawning realization that we had always known at some level that something like this was inevitable sooner or later. We remember our tears, and images of citizens applauding fire trucks going by in the streets, and thousands of pictures of the missing taped up on fences, and silent vigils with candles across America, and grimy men in yellow fire hats with sagging shoulders and tears running down their cheeks digging through mountains of smoldering wreckage.

We remember our resolve to pull together. For comfort. To do something for the families of the lost. And yes, to get those responsible. To get them once and for all. To wipe the smirks off their faces and end them.

We grieve for the dead. We especially grieve for the heroes who charged up the stairs into infernos to save others. We grieve for people who didn't deserve to die like that, and for families without a mom, or husband, or grandfather, or child. We grieve for the wounds our country and its greatest city suffered, and for the passengers on a plane called Flight 93 who gave their all and probably saved our Capitol Building or White House. They also make us proud.

We grieve also for what might have been but is not. We grieve for the unity we had and have lost. We grieve that we have lost our way and that we were let down. We grieve for having let the perpetrators get away. Bin Laden, Zawahiri and Omar yet live. Our president could have asked anything of us and we would have responded. But nothing was asked.

Instead, from the very first day, the catastrophe was seen as a golden opportunity to provide an excuse for the obsession of a few intellectuals and government officials to launch an invasion of Iraq. Some of their names are Wolfowitz, Perle, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush. There are others. A Senator named McCain began making that same case beginning September 12.

The obsession has cost us dearly. It first divided us from the world, and then from one another. We let the killers off the hook and tied our marvelous army down in a defensive posture in Mesopotamia. Along the way we gave up some principles and rights. We forgot who we are and behaved in ways that have brought us shame. And for this we grieve most of all.