there's many lost, but tell me, who has won?
Two years ago today, something happened.

Something that, until that day, was beyond the scope of our imaginations.

So much so that on the train where I was sitting in the south of France, people kept asking, "Is this a joke?" when the tour guides tried in incomplete English to explain what had happened. A joke, however cruel, we could fathom. Reality, we could not.

We watched our televisions in utter disbelief, as though we were witnessing a modern-day "War of the Worlds," and we were waiting for someone to break in and tell us it was all a lie. Then as now, for everyone who was not at the scene, it was something we could see but not touch, that never lost its air of unreality.

No matter how many times we saw it, and we saw it again and again and again, it was like watching a non sequitur, the lazy swoop of planes into buildings, where planes clearly should not be; a graceful billow of smoke and dust where glass and steel had marked the sky.

Somewhere, around the eighth or tenth time I saw it, something hard and cold penetrated the surrealism of it all. I realized, for the first time in all the disaster coverage I had ever seen, that I was watching people die. That I was seeing someone at the helm of a plane, making with deliberation a decision so horrifying I couldn't make sense of it. There was no sense to find.

Later, at dinner, we talked in hushed tones with others on the tour. We sat at a table with a couple from New York. They were the first New Yorkers I had met. We'd spoken to them earlier, before it happened, and listening to them describe the city and their family and their lives was how I discovered that New Yorkers love their city, as though it were a living thing, as though its vitality were intertwined with their own. They spoke with such sadness at dinner that night, as though the violation of their city had injured them, too, though they were an ocean away from home.

Something happened that day.

Those planes, those falling buildings, robbed us of our arrogant innocence, our belief in the invincibility of America. Things like this only happened in other parts of the world. They didn't happen to us. Because we were the globe's most powerful nation. Because we had freedom. Democracy. Because we were civilized.

We were children.

What happened that day expanded the boundaries of our fear. No longer did we worry only about hometown crime: strangers in dark alleys, serial killers, kidnappers, convenience-store stick-ups. Suddenly, nowhere was safe. No one was safe. It seemed that we could die at any second, that anything unusual might be an attack, that everyone different made us suspicious -- even if we felt guilty afterward for thinking so.

We were shocked and sad and afraid, and we clung to each other, because that's all we knew how to do.

A few days later, I sat on the steps of a church in Geneva, waiting for the bells that would sound all across the EU to honor the dead. I had expected other people to flock to the church, but no one did. When the bells began to toll, it seemed to me that everything should be still. That traffic should halt and pedestrians should stop and listen. That the city should fall silent.

It didn't, of course. People kept walking, cars kept moving, horns still honked, and the only difference was the sound of the bells, tolling, tolling. Because this was Geneva. In the rest of the world, life continued. It was only in America that time stopped on September 11.

In those first hours, those first days, what we felt was pure. Fear. Sorrow. Rage. The need to be close to the people we loved, as though they might vanish if we weren't there. September 11 may have been the first time many of us understood what life is like for people who live with terrorism every day. For people who live in fear. For a brief time, we knew what tragedy is.

But as time went by and the shock wore off, the events of that day became tangled in politics and blame, an unwinnable war on terrorism, the willingness to sacrifice liberty for security and an attack on Iraq. September 11, that was once a tragedy, now is too often only a tool. A means to an end.

We had a moment of clarity in which violence and terror were painfully, strikingly real to each of us. We could have empathized; we could have learned. Instead, we responded in kind. We have proven decisively that violence begets violence; we, too, have perpetrated terror and helped it flourish.

We haven't learned. We haven't changed.

We owe the dead a legacy of peace. If we will not pursue it, then those people died for nothing.

And that may be the greatest tragedy of all.

Song: U2, "Sunday Bloody Sunday"

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