9/11: Has It Really Been Six Years?

Today, we gather to be reassured that God hears the lamenting and bitter weeping of Mother America because so many of her children are no more.

-- REV. NATHAN BAXTER

I would be remiss if it didn't put my oar in the water on the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks if only long enough to remember the men and women who died on that horrible day and the families and other loved ones they left behind. As well as note in passing that I was in New York City the other day and the Twin Towers still were gone -- something I don't think I'll ever be able to reconcile for as long as I live.

Judging from the relative paucity of 9/11-related posts today in a blogosphere dominated by the Petraeus progress-report testimony and Brittney Hume's exclusive interview with the general on Faux News, a lot of folks have 9/11 Fatigue. I myself am unable to yet again recount my own experience on that day.

But for those of you who need that kind of fix, I highly recommend two articles: The Wind in the Heights, a moving remembrance by Gerald Vanderleun at American Digest, and 9/11 Psychology: Storytelling 9/11, an essay on the power of storytelling by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés at The Moderate Voice.

And if you need a political fix, there is The Tail of the Chimera: A Reflection on the 9/11 Terror Attacks & George W. Bush, an appropriately scathing commentary posted here last week. The essay also is included in A Progressive Historians Symposium: 9/11 at Six, a roundup over at the Progressive Historians blog.

Photograph by Thomas Hoepker/Magnum