everyone has a story about the day.

i have my own as well. in the grand scheme of things, it’s completely unimportant. i, and everyone else, felt like the world was collapsing around my ears. people who were there. people who watched it unfold in front of their unbelieving eyes. everything crumbled, and everyone everywhere felt the reverberations.

there was even more sadness in the aftermath. the morning the bombing started in afghanistan, it was the beginning of a chain reaction of further killing and atrocities that even today, nine years later, has yet to stop. nine years later, there is still innocent blood being shed in multiple countries as a direct result of that singular day.

and it exposed the nasty underbelly of hatred, both against americans and perpetuated *by* americans. a disgusting display of vitriol which people continue to ratchet up for political means. hatred is so often just a veneer for fear, and fear has always been the most effective tool of political manipulation.

how much has changed since then? looking around the political landscape, you’d be hard pressed to identify much. there is still quick anger over the wounds in the ground. there is ignorant fear in abundance. there is intolerant rhetoric being flung around like so much dirt. there is extremism tarted up as populism.

these aftershocks seem to just keep coming, and the fear continues to crescendo unabated. it continues to change more than the skyline, more than the political landscape – it continues to change americans as a people, and not for the better.

yet we seem to want to hold onto that grief. each year, we emblazon stuff with flags, tune into the mawkish memorials, wallow in the losses over and over again, year after year. and while remembrance is important to our collective history, the excessive nature of such hyper-sentimentalism holds us back. i think we want to “never forget” because it feels like letting go of who we were before – before we knew it as “before”. the reality is, that country, that world is long gone.

i can, if i want to, easily bring up tears for that day. i could, if i wanted to, tell my story as if it were yesterday. for a long time, it felt appropriate to hold on to that emotion, that moment that everything changed. for a long time, it felt inappropriate to move on.

but as long as we continue to consider ourselves a wounded country, we will never be healed. reliving the fear keeps us fearful. every year that we recount the stories as if they were fresh, keeps us stuck in the raw fury of that moment. as long as we continue to war, with others and with ourselves, we can never be at peace.

nine years on, we deserve some peace. but we have to try to move on in order to find it.

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