Anniversary

Tomorrow is the tenth anniversary of September 11, 2001. About eight hours from now, ten years ago, the first plane struck the first of the World Trade Center towers.

What has the past ten years taught us? Or, more importantly, what have we learned? What have we, as a nation and people and world learned about the dangers of hate, and the virtue of love?

We have seen a number of wars, or one big war, depending on your outlook. We have seen famine, draught, floods; earthquakes, tsunami, climate change, oil spills; political unrest, protests, killings, and (often hidden) ethnic cleansing and human trafficking; economic failure, bankruptcy, crumbling infrastructure... the list goes on.

What have we learned in the past ten years? Can we say that we have learned to love our enemy, forgive our foe? Have we gotten even the tiniest inch closer to putting aside cultural differences and realizing we all want and need the same things? Is the ever-popular beauty pageant wish- world peace- any closer at all?

The United States has seen some hard times these past ten years. Some have been related to the events of 9/11/01. Most have not, though there have been politicians, business-people, even religious leaders coming at it from every angle, milking the pain the country felt. Exposing those poor few thousand families who lost a loved one, and using their loss as fuel for war, military spending, political dominance.

Can anyone say that is right and good? To tear open a wound over and over again, to make the pain felt every day, to keep true healing at bay? We ought to perhaps doubly pity those who lost a loved one on 9/11. They haven't been able to be alone and get on with their lives, as is natural and necessary by human nature.

Three years ago our country decided to have hope. (Whatever that means to you, I do not intend to be political). But the dominant image I saw, for a good year or so, was the word "HOPE". It seemed we wanted to move on with our lives, and I breathed a sigh of relief. Perhaps we would be able to do just that, with our new-found hope in the way things could be, the way we could be in the world.

But it turns out the American public has the patience of a toddler who has missed his nap, unfortunately. As complete miracles have not been delivered on a daily basis for the past three years, those same posters of HOPE have been replaced with the disheartening word 'nope'. We don't really want to work to have hope. We've lost it in along the way, watching our sitcoms and eating our increasingly-artisan ice cream.

So here's hoping the American public learns once again to have hope that this world isn't the hostile thing we think it is, to be feared and beaten down with a stick, to be conquered. Let us hope that we learn to think of our brothers and sisters in the world as just that- siblings on this earth, worthy of love and, the very least, basic consideration. And most of all, let us hope that we learn to let pain and loss be exactly that-pain and loss- and let us not use ours as justification for causing more.