Thursday, September 07, 2006

The Stuff of Tears
Gone But Not Forgotten


The 5th anniversary of 9/11 is just around the corner. An anniversary I never want to forget but at times prefer not to remember.

Such senseless horror that, for better or for worse, removed in my mind any illusion that all the world in general and the Muslim community in particular needed was a good hug.

The wide-eyed naive liberal in me died that day and I cried till the end of the week. Lost in bottles of wine, cases of beer and CNN 24/7.

I loved New York and still do.

A city that has an organic almost corporeal feel to it 24 hours per day.

As a fan of architecture I fell in love with the Twin Towers to the point that on that day I felt the loss for the buildings first and for the thousands second.

I'd been there.

I'd stood on the observation deck and looked into the heart of Manhattan and then turned 90's west to gaze at a New Jersey caught in the lazy haze of summer.

So here were are, 5 years past that rude awakening and what have we learned?


We've re-learned what we already knew and been shocked to get confirmed what we had once only feared.

Take anything to the extreme, in particular religion, and you'll find paranoid fascism.

We've learned that the world is not all peaches and cream and that assimilation is perhaps the lesser of two evils when compared to the supposed noble purity of multiculturalism.

We've learned that others hate simply because they can't stomach the thought of being more alike than different.

We've learned that one parasitic and cancerous slice of our world will only be happy when we role our ethics and beliefs back to the time of Mohammed.

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