What we have learned since 9/11 (or What we have lost)

[rodeodance]

http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/09/03/coverstory.tm/index.html?section=cnn_topstories&eref=yahoo


What we have learned since 9/11
POSTED: 12:00 p.m. EDT, September 3, 2006

Editor's note: The following is a summary of this week's Time magazine cover story.

(Time.comexternal link) -- An American businessman, traveling in India when the planes struck the towers, made his way back to the U.S. the following week as quickly as he could. That meant hopscotching across the Middle East, stopping in Athens, Greece, overnight to change planes.

He spent the evening taking supper in a local taverna. No one in the restaurant spoke English, but when the owner realized he had an American in the house just two nights after 9/11, he asked his guest to stand up, face the other diners and listen to a toast.

And indeed, the entire room stood up, raised their glasses and said, as one, "Shoulder to shoulder, until justice is done."

Five years later, after an invasion of Afghanistan and an occupation of Iraq, and amid talk of war with Iran, it is fair to ask: Would they say it again tonight? Would we say it to each other?

This has become the loss with no grave, no chance for mourning, because we still live it every day: the loss of that transcendent unity, global goodwill, common purpose born of righteous anger that wrapped us like a bandage those first months after the attacks: a president with a 90 percent approval rating, a congress working as one, expressions of sympathy and offers of help from every corner of the planet. We are all Americans, said Le Monde.

........