Four Years On

Four years ago, I woke up late one Tuesday morning to find a group of students crying together in the hallway of my college dorm. It was the kind of raw outpouring of emotion that, over the following months and years, would allow us both individually and as a nation to slowly regain our bearings and come to our feet.

This anniversary of 9/11 brings with it a stark reminder that we humans inhabit a universe that is – despite our efforts to tame it – both maddeningly random and torturously indifferent to our suffering. Whether through a hurricane’s ferocious wind or the murderous acts of 19 depraved hearts, the chaotic trail of human events punctuates lives without apology. Out of the resulting void, we are left only with one another to find meaning and to give comfort.

This year is a particularly sad anniversary in that we as Americans seem to have temporarily lost our ability to cry together. Enormous tragedies like the recent hurricane drive home the fact that both we and our leaders frequently live life with a paradoxical air of inevitability and yet invulnerability. Tragedy and loss are inevitable and often wholly foreseeable; yet somehow only after the fact do matters take on the urgency needed to make us feel truly vulnerable. This fact is as constant as it is anger-inducing.

There will be plenty of time to ask why, once again, Americans at various levels of government acted impervious to impending threat. There will be ample opportunity to cast blame and demand accountability.

Here’s to hoping, however, that some day soon our country will regain its ability to shed collective tears. We may disagree strongly and bitterly about the preventability of terrorist attacks, about the wisdom of the Iraq war, and about the proper response to the crisis in New Orleans. But it is worth noting that no levee, no matter how strong or large, will ever serve as a complete barrier to life’s fragility. Our greatest hope for a better and less devastating future comes not from the ability to find fault, but from the compassion and resiliency that we draw from each other.

God bless the dead and those who cry for them, and God bless America.