I'm not sure what it means

I am strangely uncomfortable with the commemorations of the attacks on Washington and New York. I'm not sure exactly what it is we're supposed to commemorate. I watched on television as 4,000 people were murdered in an act of madness so obscene it took Letterman to add any perspective. I keep reading admonitions to "never forget" as if I could somehow forget what I saw that day and what I learned about human nature since.

As I write this, a man is singing the national anthem at the Chicago-Atlanta game, a rendition that will surely be described as "stirring" (it was). I muted the TV and turned up Springsteen's "The Rising." The giant American flag, crisp and bright against Soldier Fields pastoral green seems to me an attempt to sanitize what's happened, as America always sanitizes its history. What's missing are the shots of desperate people leaping from the towers, taking a chance (in my mind) that a wind gust or an awning will give them the miracle that never comes. Perhaps if Marvin Gaye was singing the anthem it would seem less sterile. Where are the images of the dead. It seems its okay that we remember them as a prop to our greatness, but to show the awful ugliness is too much.

My memories of 9/11 are blurred because I was working at a newspaper that was literally in the shadows of a massive petrochemical complex, a complex that, to this day, could easily be lit up by one loon with an RPG. What I remember most is coming home about 2 a.m. and turning on the BBC coverage. After 18 hours of hysterical American reporting in my ear all day the BBC was strangely reassuring. It made no attempt to minimize the horror and the evil of what happened, but there was a perspective lacking. The overall theme seemed to be "Welcome, America, to the real word. It's horrible that you had to arrive, but know that we are with you." (Tony Blair's presence in Congress days later as Bush spoke re-emphasized this feeling). Britain had been through this. It had survived. Despite the '93 attacks, despite McVeigh and Koresh (who were after all loony Americans, familiar to anyone in the South who has more six relatives), America and never quite admitted that it too was vulnerable to acts of madness.

But we didn't join the rest of world, even though it was so desperate for us to do so (can anyone forget Iranians singing our national anthem outside the embassy they had stormed just 20 years prior). We instead gave in to that ugly anti-intellectual emotional streak that pervades so much of our history. Terrorists killed more Americans in the last 10 years than they did Sept. 11. Are we going to mourn them today as well?

So I am not sure what to commemorate. Because a group of madmen executed an act of madness, we turned our back on what made us great. The government can now spy on its citizens without cause and without an easily obtainable warrant. Our president approved "methods of interrogation" that would trigger an invasion if another nation used them on our citizens. Some of those methods, in fact, led to the execution of perpetrators when used against our soldiers. We have tortured innocent men, and we have gained nothing from the guilty ones we tortured, but we have given up a part of our soul in the process. Perhaps emboldened by the law's inability to be applied to those in power, the governor of Texas gleefully executed a man who is surely innocent and is fighting to execute a man who might or might not be cleared by DNA tests which haven't been performed.

Our national debate coarsened over the past 10 years. A president with a resume that reads like a Horatio Alger story is vilified as an alien, a traitor and worse by a significant segment of our population, a segment that once held respect for the presidency as a sacred. A large portion of the House of Representatives believes compromise (on which this nation was built) is a sign of weakness. Political differences are no longer treated as political difference, but as heresy. Something that must be rooted out and destroyed.

Not all of this is a result of 9/11. Much of the coarsening took place long before. (No one could be uglier than the Clintons). Many have used 9/11 to justify a massive expansion of the government's power and reach.

So I'm not sure what to commemorate today. The lose of 4,000 lives grieves me, but it grieves me no more than the 5,000 or so who were lost avenging 9/11 in a place that had no connection. The loss of our civil liberties grieves me even more. In a sense, Bin Laden has won. He never posed, nor do his followers now pose, an existential threat to this nation. But he has forced us to turn on ourselves. He has convinced us to give up our sacred protections against the government, a government that is a far, far greater threat to our freedoms than anything Al Qaeda ever did.

As we cast this as a religious war, and make no mistake, the wars that we are fighting are, at this point, nothing but Crusades, how long before the religious strife turns inward. Once the warmongers lose the ability to convince us that Islam is a threat, how long before various Christian sects are excluded from the big tent (I'm looking at you Gov. Perry). I will pray today. I will pray for those who lost their lives and for their families. I will remain in awe, as I have always been, of the men who raced into Armageddon to save others. But I won't pray that God is on our side.

Ultimately, 9/11 isn't about this country. It's about the individuals such as the one pictured above (the picture accompanied Tom Junod's remarkable story in Esquire)

I will pray that we are on His.