September 11, 2006.

On September 11, 2003 I went to Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church on Clinton Street. I lit a candle, said a few prayers, and sat in a pew for a while. People came and went but it was quiet and that was what I wanted. After a few minutes I started to cry which surprised me because I thought I was all cried out over September 11. I hadn’t lost anyone or been hurt but my home, New York City, had been attacked. Its buildings and citizens lives destroyed.

I let a few tears out then decided that I wouldn’t shed another tear over September 11. Not out of the, “then the terrorists win,” crap that people spouted to push feelings of fear and lack of control further down in there psyche, but because two of the greatest events of my life would come out of September 11, 2001. In the summer of 2001 my wife Persephone was packing her things to move to Portland Oregon. Her apartment had boxes stacked on that morning in 2001, but being a native New Yorker she decided she was going to stay. This was her home. She had been born and raised in the Bronx and leaving now was wrong. That December we went on our first date, in 2003 we were married and in 2006 our daughter was born.

When I left Saint Paul’s I walked home through our beautiful neighborhood, I felt blessed a thousand times to be with Persephone and have the life we have. My life and her life had gotten immeasurably better since we meet despite the hurt and pain of our lives prior to our meeting compounded by the anxiety and uncertainty of a post September 11 world. We now had each other and would soon have Ella. None of these things would have happened if she had moved to Portland.

I think that the good, the love, the unpredictable, that came out of September 11, 2001, has been pushed aside. Maybe because it was on a scale to small for headlines, or because or nation wanted revenge, or because we were scared and being scared is our national past time. Or because all events have two sides and we as Americans don’t like that. We want things to be one way, good, bad, right wrong, loss, gain. I say this not because I think Americans are ignorant or simplistic but because we as Americans love to be optimistic. Anything is possible. A better life a better world a new day is just around the corner. When that belief is challenged we tend to over react, over simplify, and over indulge. At our heart we as Americans want to be “good.” We want democracy and equality. We aren’t perfect but we have as system that lets us try and we get it right some of the time. After all isn’t that an American flag being raised on Iwo Jima and on the Moon?

My fear is not of another attack because there is nothing I can do about that in the same way that I may be killed by a drunk driver, or any other unforeseen event. My fear is for my daughter living in a nation that is so consumed with fear that it is forgetting the good so quickly that it is attempting to kill itself by becoming less democratic, less free, and less independent. We forget that a nation flourishes because of its opportunities and it liberties. People use the excuse, “then the terrorists win,” bilge to validate anything from squelching a national day of mourning on the first anniversary of September 11 to telling people to get out and buy a new car.

Abraham Lincoln said in 1838, “At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect some transatlantic giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? All the armies of Europe, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years. At what point, then, is the approach of danger to be expected? If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

The terrorists win every time our government uses the Constitution as toilet paper. The terrorists win every time we as a nation, through no outside influence, decide to be just as petty, just as ignorant, just as violent, as those who attacked us. Taking away our rights won’t make our nation safer. As Ben Franklyn observed, “They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

The President wants us to believe that the Terrorists hate us because of our freedoms. Under Bush’s “leadership” we have nothing to fear because if things go as they have been going the United States will be a police state controlled by fundamentalists in a few years and the terrorists will have no reason to hate us.

My heart goes out to those people who lost family and friends on United 93, or in the Pentagon, or the World Trade Center. I wouldn’t want to be in their shoes or the shoes of the men and women who responded to the disaster at the WTC and are now getting sick as a consequence. The NYPD and FDNY exercised the great American virtue of optimism that day five years go. They thought someone was alive and they were going to save them. They were going to help the injured and stop as many people from dieing as they could. Now they need help and their isn’t any. But we can fix this. There is still more good in our nation than there is fear. We can be the equitable, fair, and democratic nation that Lincoln and Franklyn loved and have as Lincoln said in 1863, “a new birth of freedom.”