A Decade Hence

It is not having been in the dark house,

but having left it, that counts.
-- Theodore Roosevelt

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What began a decade ago as a bright Tuesday morning full of promise, soon quite literally exploded into a new age for Americans.  In a moment of great separation, thousands of souls were gone without goodbyes.  We were thrust into an era of heightened vigilance and suspicion -- one in which we were all fully aware of the willingness (and eagerness) of our enemies to kill themselves as along as it meant they could kill some of us at the same time.

As a nation, we froze in bewilderment at the images and reports of planes flown into buildings or falling from the sky in the Pennsylvania countryside.

It was quite an incomprehensible demarcation that drew a sharp line dividing life before that day from life after.

The twin towers of the World Trade Center, symbolic stanchions of our nation's spirit, thundered down into the bedrock of a new millennium's zeitgeist.  Families floundered in the face of irrevocable absence.  Citizens struggled to cope with the scope of atrocities and the audacity of such enmity.

For a brief period, we Americans were drawn together and united in a collective huddle, cloistered like a crowd drawn to a beacon in the darkness of oblivion.  We shambled forward in a global cortege, numb with vulnerability and uncertainty, but increasingly finding our resolve.  That dark day has been countered with foreign policies, military actions, and covert special operations that have retaliated against organized terrorism with great consequence (from Bush's coalition of the willing to Obama's daring Abbottabad raid) -- despite the expected casuistry from opponents.

On that September day, when I was scrambling for the latest news about attacks at the Pentagon and World Trade Center, my oldest daughter was in third grade.  A decade later, she lives in the Chelsea District in Manhattan, not too far (not far enough!) from Ground Zero and potential targets like Penn Station/Madison Square Garden and the Empire State Building.  So, the anniversary of atrocity brings an extra dose of anxiety for me this year, this day.