If we were playing the “Where Were You” game, I would tell you about how T-L and I were enjoying the glorious morning and each other, (you may have to check with her to see if the second part was really mutual), in the privileged security of a friend’s home on City Island, observing the smoke, oblivious to the terror, until a half-naked neighbor ran screaming down the beach. The day and America’s future, (see last week’s entry which is, in fact, my entire essay on the matter, contrary to many of you who commented on it’s brevity), took a horrible and reactionary downturn which lead us ultimately into two irrational, unfocused and unwinnable wars, the degradation of the basic principles of our personal freedom and, most troubling, the abandonment of any focused and progressive direction for the country. Anyone who thinks that the terrorists did not succeed far beyond their expectations…really isn’t thinking.

My personal degree of separation from more than one victim of the attack is low enough that my heart continues to ache for friends who lost loved ones. Yet, as an American, with no separation from the feelings I hold dear for the promise of our once great nation, I have become nearly inconsolable as I bear witness to its free-falling collapse. 911, as horrible as it was, should have unified our country, Pearl Harbor-like, to broaden and better ourselves; to provide the most devastating response to those that chose to hate us, that America would not simply recover, but prosper and remain a shining example of the best humans can achieve. We chose instead the blueprint response of the assassinated Osama and his ilk by funding a bottomless military pit, chasing billion dollar shadows around the globe while systematically underfunding, ignoring or blatantly dismantling the foundations that made us who we are. We have become nothing more than a giant ensemble of mad fiddlers fiddling as our hopes and dreams are reduced to ash. Or…maybe I’m overreacting.