Six Years and Counting

Quote of the day:
“If we judge, we need to prepare to be judged.”
--Preston Creston

At 5:45 this morning in Cambria a small group of people gathered at the Veterans Hall for a minute of silence. Later, American flags were placed along Main Street.

I thought again about where I was when I heard the news. Like most Southern Californians at that early hour, Merrie and I were home. I learned by turning on my computer and going to my Yahoo home page.

On the top shelf of our closet is the “Wall Street Journal” from September 12, 2001. It’s just sitting there--it’s not specially preserved or in a plastic bag or anything. The Journal’s coverage was extraordinary because its editorial offices were adjacent to the World Trade Center.

“September 11th changed everything” has become both a mantra and a justification for political actions. However the statement is used, I’m not sure it’s true.

It might be true if we added the invisible clause “for me” or “for most Americans.” Through naivete or inertia we had come to complacently assume that the world loved us, or at least respected us.

Thus in the days after September 11, 2001 we repeatedly heard the plaintive question “why do they hate us?” As in, “we are so good, how could anyone do this to us?”

Then we had the distancing. The people who did this were evil. They were somewhere else. They were foreign. They used Islam as a justification.

This allowed us to still be good--to still call ourselves the greatest nation. The bad people were “out there” and “they” did this to us for an evil reason.

We learned that, whether we understand it or accept it or not, there are many people in the world who do not like us. And we learned that there are many, many more who do like America but strongly disapprove of our actions. And we learned that not all of these people are “evildoers.”

At least I hope we learned that.