The Day Everything Changed

I was working as a cabinet maker on September 11, 2001. My benchmate John Rehark--Catholic, frenetic, and rabidly Conservative--had his usual newsradio going when the first reports of the infamy started coming in. I can still smell the freshly sawn Finnish birch and red oak and still feel the vibrations of the random orbit sander in my right hand at the mere thought of that morning.

To touch that memory now is like running the fingers over a string of pearls--vivid little tableaux branded in the mind by emotion--such as the morning of May 2, 1970 when I walked quietly around the corner of a University Library, past a redolently sweet group of old-fashioned flowering quinces, and--suddenly and unexpectedly--into a hail of exploding tear gas canisters. The hair that then brushed my shoulder blades, and the texture of the white terrycloth shirts I favored brushing against my chest, are still as vivid as ever.

So many years have passed from the one, so few from the other. And yet, as we have seen in this Presidential campaign, they are inextricably intertwined. The Vietnam War made us who we are now, and the attack on the WTC and the Pentagon was an attack on who we are now. Who are we now?

Maybe after several thousand dead civilians and 1000 dead soldiers there are a few answers. We mourn the dead of the WTC and the Pentagon openly, wear them in our hearts, on our television screens, and on our sleeves. We hide the dead from view when they return from Iraq, and they only appear on television as an obvious and transparent political football to kick and pass back and forth from the Right goalpost to the Left goalpost.

We are the country of political Bad Faith and we have been so since the Gulf of Tonkin incident those many years ago. Bad Faith is in our air, Bad Faith is in our water, Bad Faith is in our ears, and Bad Faith is in our eyes. Nothing will do but that our own agenda triumph so completely, and our fellow American adversaries are defeated so utterly, that they are driven out of political life, and, perhaps, even out of the country itself. We all wish our leader of choice not to compromise, not to govern, but to rule.

The saddest thing of all is that when I go out onto the blogosphere to post, so many of my friends, both Conservative and Liberal, are of an age too young to really remember now what American politics was like before the coming of the Bad Faith, to really remember when leaders compromised and governed with the loyal opposition, rather than trying to rule in spite of them.

Because I am old enough to remember it, I post comments primarily on the blogs of my political opposition, and consider most everybody over there to be my friends, whether they reciprocate or not. I say "most everybody" because there are one or two whose coarse language and rhetoric of deliberate insult would try the patience of a saint. I am no saint.

We got a brief, sweet taste again of what that older America was like between The Day Everything Changed and the battle of Tora Bora. We were united in purpose, agreed in strategy, and had the support and good will of most of the sane people in the rest of the world. Then the Bad Faith returned. I'm not concerned to argue at the moment whose fault it is or why, but it is simply a fact. The Bad Faith returned and we are up to our nipples in it even as I write.

Perhaps The Day That Changed Everything didn't really change that much at all. Maybe its up to us to actually change everything if we really want it changed. I'm willing to try, so I'm still posting comments on those Conservative blogs.