I have never written about the events of 9/11/01 before; they were still too fresh and bloody for my mind to have enough clarity and comfort to express what I feel. The people that died that day were important and will never be less so in spite of any amount of time that passes. The hopes and dreams that passed on that day are as significant as those we have all lost on any single day in our past as a nation. Peace in our world is a fading dream today and the war on terror seems eternal. Our vision of a world in which we will pass a nation at peace on to our children and grandchildren burned along with those planes and buildings and lives. Hope for a future of growth and economic expansion that opens the world up to the prosperity our generation in the USA has known disappeared into those clouds of roiling smoke. No one today is seriously talking about the DOW at 25,000 or NASDAQ composite at 10,000 and a world of free trade unparalleled in human history.

The world is more divided because of that day, and our response to it, than it has been since the last World War wreaked havoc on so much of the world. We survived that war virtually unscathed compared to Europe and Japan and Russia and China and most of the nations of the Middle East. We saved the world in that time from the Nazi plague and the threat of Japanese oppression, and it was appropriately still grateful and supportive immediately after 9/11. We were all one except for those few that felt their future lay more with the terrorists than with us. They were still few in the days and weeks immediately following the destruction of those towers and the hope that they represented for a world of prosperity and free trade. There was still a glimmer of hope that the vision of America the world had held since WWII would prevail. It was a vision of a nation with the good of the world at the core of its politics and interests.

Not that we have never acted selfishly, we did that common thing quite often. But we always came back to the American people's commitment to a just and Democratic world. A world where everyone could gain the prosperity and hope that all who embrace the dream feel in this nation. The world saw us as the rising hope of the masses everywhere and we shared our hope and our technology and our dream and our wealth willingly in transplanting that hope everywhere we went. Oh yes sometimes we hurt people with our power. But we demolished Communism in the process; or rather it demolished itself as we demonstrated the virtues of capitalism and the benefits of Democracy to all who would see.

In the Wake of 9/11 which we are attending still, the certainty of our leadership has faltered, not in the vocalization of our efforts in the war on terror. The President and his councilors vociferously appeal to this nation and the world that our war on terror is being waged in Iraq rightly and that we will prevail. No, it has failed in the vision of a world united in prosperity and hope. We have retired from the field of democratic dreams and entered the reality of an empire focused on the use of blunt instruments of force to make the world over in its image. The world has responded by trusting us less, supporting us less and believing in us far, far less than anytime in the past sixty years. The leadership of this nation has cast us in the role of world bully in response to our fear and confusion after 9/11, and we are accepting that role. It is a role that diminishes our ability to take the high moral ground in this war of cultures that we are engaged in today.

We need our friends more today than ever before, and we are abandoning them in the fury of our search for relief from the images and emotions of that fateful day. Our future depends on our alliances and the respect the world has, not for our power, but for our meaning and the values we project from within our nation. Our leaders today are projecting certainty abroad based on our capacity to use military force, and fear at home as a means of stimulating the public to approve their endless wars. The world notices the dissonance and will reject our leadership as long as that note prevails. We threaten the world far more than the terrorists when we act out of anger and fear instead of hope and trust in the future.
It must not be the images of those towers burning and falling that define our nation in the future. It must be our continuing faith in a world of hope for democracy and capitalism and the good of our allies as well as our own. It must not be our unilateral projection of our capacity for military force that creates our image in the world. It must be our respect for the differences in culture and religion and political philosophy that prevail in the world at large that people see when they see our face. It must not be our bombs falling on our enemies that define our self respect. It must be our love of justice and our willingness to forgive and forget the hurts of the past that our posture in the world evokes. Everyone can fear our power, but only our friends can respect our dreams. God bless and keep you all safe in these times of broken dreams.