Unity

I guess that everyone remembers what they were doing on September 11,  2001. I had taken my mother for an ECT treatment for her depression and was sitting in the family lounge at the hospital when the TV announced that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. Then the second plane flew in and the rest is history, as they say.

I didn't know the repercussions of what had happened and how far reaching the aftermath would be, but I felt a sick feeling that this act would bring about a war, more bloodshed, and perhaps threaten the world as no other conflict had. Some of my earliest thoughts weren't off the mark. We have a war, we have more bloodshed. Although our world continues to revolve around the sun, I feel restless about the well-being of this country and the state of the world in general.

I thought that the days immediately after 9/11 were ones of unity for the country.  It was as if the tragedy brought us together.  We didn't really care whether we were Democrat or Republican.  I thought that spirit of unity would continue but alas, it seems that the unity has become replaced by separatism.  Many are suspicious of others because they have a different religion or a different skin color.  The years of spending on war have come at great cost to the social, educational, environmental, and health conditions of the country and world. Our fabric has begun to unravel.

I was hoping that the tragedy of 9/11 would be the kind of wake up call to this country that would bring about something positive in the world. That we would be looked upon with respect because we had learned to take care of each other here so that people would be better educated, have better health care, housing, and a feeling of connection to the other nations in the world.

Yet, now we seem more divisive as a nation than ever.  I don't understand the hatred that we exhibit towards others who think differently or act differently.  I think that the real tragedy these years after 9/11 is that we haven't learned real lessons about the rest of the world and how to take the best of this country and use it to the benefit of our own people and other nations.  President Kennedy, in his speech inaugurating the Peace Corps, said something like: "Those who have so much will not be able to keep it if they are unwilling to share with those who have so little." In other words, we have to give it away, in order to keep it.

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Genuine, national self examination would be a tribute to those who tragically died on 9/11. Perhaps we need to think about what unites us together and not what our differences are.  Maybe if we each do our best to understand and not condemn, to speak our own truth and not what we are fed by entertainers, and to pull together with compassion today, it will be a small but powerful start.