Year Ten at Ground Zero

The general theme of yesterday's memorials, one of grief remembered but honorably laid to rest, is one I willingly bow. Watching the MSNBC stock footage of 9/11 as it happened, I was struck by the strangeness of the tone; the confusion amid the birth-cries of a world we now know well. That was a different country, and I am a different man. When I wrote the following in 2003, I was newly discovering a truth I have since come to live with:

One year ago, we took stock in our classroom, and a teacher showed slides, and played some bit of ethereal melancholia in the background. I'd thought myself inured to the whole affair. The Taliban had crumbled and we were getting ready to put the move on Saddam; the situation had improved. But I found myself looking into the eyes of students who responded to the images with tears, and then I responded similarly. My voice choked, and all the sadness I never permitted myself to feel was upon me. I got through it, but at the end of the school day was in chapel, stifling sobs, asking God if this was what it felt like.

And at that moment I wasn't referring to 9-11 but every last 9-11 that had ever streaked its red trail across the earth. I thought of every last battle, every last raid, every invasion of the brutal onto the peaceful. Every bomber run. Every Rape of Nanking. Every Klansman riding out of the night.

Many people have bandied about the phrase "New Normal" in the years since. But the only normal thing about the New Normal is that it is always new. History, red in tooth and claw, came upon us again on 9/11/01, and it has been having its way with us ever since. We have launched wars, endured recessions, shouted in the streets, played spot-the-fascist, and come to question all the rules we thought were writ in stone. Bin Laden, then a fearsome, shadowy Nemesis, today molders in his watery grave, which all agree does nothing to end the war he began. Ten years ago, our politics consisted of already-tired grumbling that George Bush had been "selected, not elected" to the  Presidency. Today, its which side will bear the blame when (not if) our public finances collapse. Today, a black man of the Left governs from the Oval Office, as the Right parties like it's 1773. The Sudan has split; the Euro is eroding. The New Normal is No Normal.

So, with the shattered Towers transformed into watered gravestones for those eternally interred by them, we can at last put our grief and rage from memory into history. We have remembered, and we have moved on, through the light and shadow of a world born in fire. We make the best of that world to the extent that we feel that those who suffered at last have peace. Time will bury all wounds, but as the centuries pass, men and women will walk through Lower Manhattan and see the names of those martyred for being American.