September 9, 2002

One Year Ago

One year ago today, September 9, 2001. It was a Sunday. I watched a video of a dark old film of Orson Welles doing MacBeth. A phrase stuck in my mind, though I didn't know why. I even wrote it down. "Something Wicked This Way Comes."

Later when I remembered it, I shuddered. To remember my innocent hearing of that phrase in a time that was on the other side of the line September 11 drew between the present and everything that had passed before that day. Later I would say, "If I had only known just how wicked..."

Of course for others that day would not be as malignantly memorable as some other day, the day when their own loved ones were killed. Many people in the Middle East and elsewhere in the Third World go through their own horrors like September 11 over and over while we live in relative bliss. But for many of us, it was a moment at which the world we had been in vanished in an instant and a new world was created. We are still strangers in the new one. We don't yet know much about this new world. Yet we are compelled to live in it.

Now we are back to those perfect September days, like that day last year when the world changed in one dreadful moment. Now such a day of perfect weather seems to carry an incipient threat.

It was Kierkegaard who said that while life can only be understood backwards, it must still be lived forwards. So here we are, in the brave new world of the 21st Century. And probably the horrors we are yet to experience, what is waiting in the wings, will some day cause us to remark at how little we knew on September 9, 2002.

God save America.

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