September 11- one year later

My daily commute has to be one of the biggest perks to living back here instead of LA. In LA, we’d get on the freeway and plug along through traffic till we merged with another freeway and get off in time to sit through several traffic lights before we finally got to school. The colors we saw concrete gray and smog beige. Now, when I take L-51 South to Dunlap at sunrise, the colors are different every day. If I encounter any traffic it’s farm equipment or deer. Plenty of time to think and prepare for the day.

This morning (9/11) as I drove in I listened to live coverage of the memorial services at the sight of the World Trade Center on National Public Radio. New York Governor George Pataki recited the Gettysburg Address. He reminded people at the memorial that Lincoln was at the dedication ceremony of battlefield that was to become a war memorial. Pataki noted that he had the same responsibility 139 years later.

Consider Lincoln’s words with new emphasis:

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war.

We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth."

I was crying. As I passed Dunahm’s barn and headed for the railroad tracks, I was crying. That place that used to be the capital of the financial world is now a holy place, a resting place, and a memorial. No matter what they build there, a statue, new offices, a park. It will always be "Ground Zero."

It is for us the living to be dedicated to the task before us. How long until unity, service to others, volunteerism and patriotism go out of fashion again? So many returned to Church at this time last year, but how many have continued to attend? We’re resolved as a nation to not be pushed around, to not be attacked again, but how has our foreign policy changed? Have we taken up the mantle of responsibility that only the most affluent society, the only remaining super power can take up? Have we changed? Every Christmas there’s a cliché about living every day as if it were Christmas. Will we make every day ‘Patriots’ Day?’

The weekend before you read this, I traveled to Phoenix for the baptism of my brother’s first baby. I have to admit that for the first time in my entire life I’m nervous about flying in an airplane. I hope that that’s not the only kind of change we experience. I hope that we’ll take our freedom less for granted. I hope we’ll make an effort to get to know the people who live around us. I hope we’ll be more likely to give and less likely to make demands on others. I hope that we’ll not only show more appreciation for policemen and firemen but for postal employees and pilots too. I hope we’ll volunteer more. I hope we’ll try to find solutions together, rather than sticking to party lines. I hope we’ll pray more.

Looking at books of photos of 911 in Wal-Mart one is struck by how much Ground Zero resembled a volcano for weeks after the attack. The landscape was irrevocably changed