I too must dutifully blog about this day two years ago, when a new, sombre history began or so it would appear to our adolescent eyes. What if not adolescence can one call our prior oblivion to mortality and our persistent smarting from the shattering of our invincibility?

If we were grown-up then we might have, for instance, added a black stripe to our red-white-and-blue ribbons as a solemn reminder of the other September 11 atrocity in our history. In coping with our loss and outrage we might have found some solace in understanding the atrocities that began that day thirty years ago in Chile. We might have reflected upon the pain we inflicted upon our not too distant neighbors by blessing, sponsoring or orchestrating a deadly coup against the goverment that they elected and the dictatorship that terrorized them for seventeen years to come.

Perhaps we have grown in the past two years. Perhaps many of us did cringe at the callousness of Donald Rumsfeld's closing remark on News Hour with Jim Lehrer:

We're killing, capturing terrorists in Iraq which is a... Baghdad today which is a whale of a lot better than Boise.

At least we know that turning Baghdad into a battleground will not keep the war away from Boise.

--aslam

12:47:44 AM