Five Years

I know you've heard about it, read about it, and already thought about it, but I'll restate the obvious: it's been five years since the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Five years since our nation awoke, turned on the television, and realized Life Will Always Be Different.

So many of us have equated life in America with longevity. We all lived in an idyllic insular world where no tragedies happen to people like us, because we live in a country of privilege. We will not starve, die for want of antibiotics, or fall victim to a bloody genocidal war. September 11th was not only a day of tragedy, it was a day of change. It was the day we realized these things can happen to us. It was the day we realized our mortality.

So how what has changed since that day?

On the flimsiest of pretenses, we've plunged headlong into a seemingly endless conflict in the Middle East. Thousands of Iraqi citizens are dead as a result. Here at home, thousands of others struggle to cope with the loss of a friend, a son or daughter, wife or husband, mother or father. There are once proud soldiers who will never walk again. Do they know to whom and for what they have given their legs?

I've heard people say we are fighting a war for freedom, but do they actually know what that means? I have sat in a Syrian woman's living room, burning with shame, as I listened to an interpreter tell the story of her brother and nephew's deaths. They were Iraqi citizens killed in Baghdad by American bombs. The dead are not free.

I've heard people say we are fighting a war to ensure the basic rights of the American people, yet we are willing to take those same rights from others. We live in a world where it's acceptable to incarcerate thirteen year old children, endlessly interrogate prisoners in secret military prisons, and suspend fundamental rights instilled by the Constitution of the United States. We've traded our sanity for security, and told ourselves "the end justifies the means", not at all realizing all we've become our own worst enemy. How much are we willing to give up in the name of security? How much are we willing to take from others so we can be 'free'?

It seems all those things we dread, we have become.

It's been three years since Our President declared "major combat operations in Iraq have ended", raising his hands triumphantly in the air, stirring the hornets' nest that is fantaticism. No wonder the stinging hasn't stopped.

We cannot erase our past, but we can build a brighter future. On this day, September 11th, 2006, let us call for peace. Let us demand a reinstatement of our civil liberties. There is no better way to honor our dead.