A few years back, now, I reflected on what is now and will likely continue to be regarded as the second major event in the new millennium in the United States (the first being the opening of the millennium): the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. It joins the fifth of November, Goliad, and the Alamo as a thing not to forget, and it is akin to 7 December 1941 in being a day that lives in infamy. Or it seems like it should, somehow, even if there seems to be less and less commemoration of, well, all such things. They’re decades gone and more, now, and there is always some new thing on which to fixate, some new wrong that deserves attention and redress (and I say so much sincerely); what has happened is crowded out by what is happening.

There is still not a picture needed for this.

So much is not inappropriate, of course. What went before cannot be changed, although regard for and understanding of it certainly can and almost as certainly should. (This is not to say evil should be excused, of course, though I know well that many will look at the revelation of nuance and detail as an attempt to do so. I see it happen too much with other things not to think that the same will happen again, and while I know that it is not strictly logical, I also know that reason is more than logic alone, despite the stated pretenses of far too many.) What is happening now can, at least to some degree, be changed; what is happening now can, at least to some degree and for some people, be improved. Who benefits and to what extent remain open questions, although they seem to be closing more daily, and in part because of what happened in the wake of the terrorist attacks whose twenty-second anniversary is today.

If we have grown scarred as the cliché has it, it shows us as having been injured and being able to feel less as a result of it. Touch the scars you have, who have them, and then the never-cut flesh beside it, and tell me which place is more sensate. Consider the scars that are shown, and consider, too, the deeper ones formed by wounds not seen but still inflicted, tears and cuts and punctures deep within that make the lungs breathe more raggedly, the bowels move in fits and starts, the heart lurch. We live who live; we endure who do. But we do not do either so well as we did before, though we parade where we have been wounded.

The wounds show more fully the more closely and the smaller we look, of course. How many and how grievous have been inflicted, have been endured, have been accepted? Smooth skin is not necessarily a prize, youth and inexperience not virtues in themselves because unearned (and is there not a fixation on earning to be found?), but not all injuries are deserved, and not all scars are merited.

These years later, having seen the results of fear indulged too long and often, have we yet learned the lessons offered for such high tuition as makes pennies of what a bursar will bill? Or will we need more remediation?

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