The shadow that the sun can't block

This column was born on the evening of September 14, 2001 when I sat down to write a long e-mail to respond to all the people who had been in contact with me to ask me how I had survived 9/11 in the city hardest hit. As I typed out an e-mail to my friends and acquaintances, the city was filled with the acrid smell of burnt rubber and melted plastic and death. The streets were smoky and the sky was filled with the sound of military jets flying overhead.

The e-mail was an attempt to make sense of what had just occurred and to assure those who loved me that I was alright. Psychically bruised but alive. I was safe. Tripp was safe.

But we have never been the same; either of us. None of us have.

For all of us, the world changed.

Somehow Hal Eisner received that e-mail or one of the others that followed it and asked me if I would write a weekly column about what it was like to be a New Yorker as the city moved away from the catastrophe.

I was both honored and relieved that Hal asked me to write about my experiences because I knew it would be an experience that would help me heal. And, like everyone else in New York, Washington, Pennsylvania, the country, I was in need of healing.

Now, today, in the heartland of the country, in the warm, swampy fields of Florida, in the cornfields of Middle America, on the turkey farms of the south, 9/11 is a reality that has been fading.

We are almost three years from 9/11 and we are moving on but as I have viewed the papers this week it is painfully evident that the world we are currently living in has been shaped by what happened that day.

Because while the acrid smell of burnt rubber and death has lifted from the streets of New York, we are still assessing, analyzing, and coping with that day. The 9/11 Commission Report is splashed all over the papers and all over the networks.

For those of us who lived in New York and DC that day, it is painful because it scrapes away the scabs that have grown over our psychic wounds. While 9/11 may be fading from the cornfields of Middle America and from the golf courses of Florida, what is present in their lives now is the sad sounds of Taps being played at the funerals of young men and women who are dying in Iraq in a war that was justified by the current administration by the events of 9/11, a justification that has been this week called into question by the commission formed to investigate the events of that day.

What is also painful is that the moral justification that lay behind our invasion of Iraq has been stripped away by lack of evidence on all fronts. No weapons of mass destruction have been found. No solid links between Iraq and Al Qaeda have been found.

What is evident is that Osama Bin Laden did carefully plan and orchestrate the events that happened that day but we have not found him and his voice continues to torment us from wherever he is hiding. We have not secured Afghanistan while we certainly cannot claim to have subdued Iraq. Dozens of people have died this week, some Americans but many more Iraqis.

Our honor and our pride, the foundation of our national sensibility, have been shattered by what happened at Abu Ghraib. And as those atrocities were being committed, we discovered that our Federal attorneys were crafting words that would justify behavior that we would have damned in anyone else.

The actions that created the horror of 9/11 and our reactions to 9/11 have resulted in all of us, even as we wish ardently to put all of this behind us, in living in a world of shadows from which we will spend a generation emerging.