UNTIL THE END
Two years to the day. Here we are. At war.
We were at war before 9-11-01, we just didn't know it.
I wrote a chronology of that day last year, which is here. I don't see the need to write another one.
I also don't see the need to commemorate 9-11. If you don't think about it in some way every day, why set aside one day to commemorate? If it isn't in your consciousness often, why bring it up now?
9-11 was terrible, awful, horrific--yet unifying. We all watched firefighters and cops rush into a disaster that everyone else would run away from. We saw the buildings fall on them. We saw them die.
Two years later, the welders who rushed to the scene that day to cut metal trapping the victims are still finding more of the dead. Two years later.
The fire burned for months, a thick column of black smoke visible from space, carrying lost work, lost architecture, lost life. And lost innocence.
The unity of 9-11 didn't last. Within a week or two, cruel people began committing their first acts of memory-theft. They tried to blame the disaster on us. It was America's fault, you see. We brought it on ourselves. How their hearts, if they have hearts, must have secretly leaped as one victim after another hit the pavement.
The Palestinians cheered. They danced in the streets.
Never forget.
We're at war now. We lost 3,000 in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania--to my north, south, and back north. But to put the day in numbers is to diminish it. If we just count bodies, 3,000 among 300,000,000 isn't so bad; three buildings and a few airplanes among thousands is survivable. But it was not that day's body count that made the events so horrendous. It was the truth behind it--if we don't strike back and defeat the people who did this, there will be another 9-11, and another, and pretty soon 9-11 will just be one terrible date among many.
We can't live like that.
How long must we fight?
Until the end.