After Effects

I'm a day late in posting a remembrance of September 11, 2001 (Patriot Day), because I was ill yesterday, and not able to focus on the screen, let alone fumble much with the keyboard. What I now present are my thoughts and strong opinions, in brief.

For those of you who, like me, refuse to forget what happened that day and how much we need true patriots--true heroes, true statesemen, true soldiers--as much now as we did when this country first came into being, here is an online anthology of poems, courtesy of About.com: Poems After the Attack.

Below is an excerpt from "911" by Ken Adams:

i run past the weeping, hands to wetted heads
as pillar two sinks to its death
extracting in its molt the last of morning sun

impaling forever yesterday's assurances
as i close my eyes and tumbleweed
down the sidewalks of Nagasaki
replaying newsreels shamelessly displayed

©2002, Ken Adams aka Dudley Appleton

This excerpt is from "An American Soldier" by Mary Hamrick:

I am a soldier, your sweet protector
(where old terrors mingle) creeping on until their
undoing.
Sign of life,
as I carry the world piece by piece.

©2001, Mary Hamrick

I wrote pages and pages in my journal that day and for many days thereafter, my dreams seared by the sight of people falling and jumping to their deaths in order to escape death. I remember the heart-clutching helplessness of listening, watching, unable to do anything, being one person and so far away.

Since the fading of the first flush of altruism and American spirit, we've descended into political games, absurd conspiracy theories, and even outright treason (in WWII, such acts and such speech would have been tried in court; now, it's glossed over as Constitutionally protected free speech).

What seems to be reported over and over in the media are all the failures or missteps, all the goals that are so long in being achieved. What we the people rarely hear about are all the plots since then that have been foiled, all the enemies of our country who have been caught. We want special rights--AMERICAN RIGHTS--given to our enemies, to terrorists, to enemy combatants. I don't understand how we can invite them to do once more what their brothers did that day.

What their brothers did to ours.

There are times to turn the other cheek. 9/11 was not one of them.