9/11 celebrations and reflections

We had a pretty smooth bell service for 9/11 commemoration. The little neighborhood we're in had like... 13 deaths? All the Churches rang their bells at once at 8:46 today, the time of the first hit five years ago. It really brings home how much moral high ground we've lost since then... the squandered opportunity we had to make the world a little more humane place.

According to me we squandered the opportunity precisely because we reacted humanly and not divinely. The old addage that forgiveness is divine I think stems from the fact that it's not real normal... we have to want to do it in spite of our gut instincts. The power comes from the conviction that in spite of iniquity and bads heaped upon us that there will be justice eventually, that it is inescapable, and that is what allows us to let go of the need to visit justice through our own methods.

Had the US chosen this path, the path of forgiveness and reconciliation and addressing the roots of such terror, I dare say the world would look a little better now, and our legacy as a nation would be completely different as our time in the sun dims into the memory of posterity. Hopefully people will look at our example and the next great people, or even us if we still have greatness in us, will know next time that the eye for an eye method, however ethical it may seem, in the end renders a more hostile and evil place than the two turned cheeks.

As it is we're just going to be another bully who got hit on the playground and decided to beat up some little kids rather than grow up. Perhaps that's the saddest legacy of Sep. 11th, the squandered opportunity.