five years later

five years ago, a beautiful day like today. what we saw, experienced, lived through, was awful. loss, pain, horror, bravery, courage, the gamut of the best and worst of people was expressed that day and the weeks that followed.

what do I summon up now, september 11, 2006. hard to touch the grief...remember what it was like that week when we all cried for days, the memorial in union square, the faces of the lost plastered everywhere, the inner thoughts so private so painfully shared. somewhere I have saved the newspapers of that week still too painful to reread. saved is the red cross paper cup handed to me on the manhattan bridge as I walked home with the thousands. it's an unneeded reminder, a souvenir I can't bear to look at directly.

but I also summon up anger. anger at the know-nothing red-state tourists who pose and gawk at something they can't begin to understand. anger at the politicians who use this tragedy not to right wrongs but as currency in their own savage crusades. anger at the arrogance of americans, unused to such violent intercession acting like this tragedy was more painful than the thousands of tragedies inflicted by those waving our flag yesterday, today, tomorrow on people not so very different than our flesh bone blood but worlds, oceans, lifetimes away.

how many september 11ths has the u.s. inflicted on iraq. how many lost husbands, wives, sisters, brothers, children, friends...blameless victims of tragedy wielded blindly, intently, by bureaucrats with murderously steely eyes and deadened hearts.

so stupid. so wasteful. so sad.

all empires fall. people, they cry.