The Only Comfort That I know

I have been thinking about what to write, just as I did last year. And it seems to me, that other than changing one word (the number of years it has been), what I wrote last year is as true now as it was then.

I've been wondering all day what I would say. What is there that can be said? There are no words that will take us back to the way things were before The World Trade Center fell. There are no words that will undo the horror of that day or the shame of the years that have followed. Thousands of people, all but the tiniest number of them, totally innocent, are dead. Thousands more are wounded, physically or spiritually. Life will never be the same again. Two countries have been invaded, with no long lasting good and much harm coming out of it so far. The ground in Afghanistan and Iraq is littered with depleted uranium, that our government rained down upon the heads of the civilian populations. There are so many widows and orphans and parents who have lost children where before there were families. The Afghani poppy crop is bigger than ever before and the Taliban is regaining the ground that we left prematurely in order to attack a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. Osama bin Laden is still at large. The Constitution of the United States is under attack from within. Our government has imprisoned people without charges for over five six years. And tortured people. And allowed the rape of Muslim women, who were then driven by the conditions of their culture to commit suicide. Our government has felt no shame in sending mostly working class young people to attack brown skinned people who do not worship as we do. That frail, miraculous thing, the human body has been violated and torn apart and destroyed in nightmarish ways. The souls of those who knew and loved those who were lost in the planes, in the towers, on foreign soil are bruised beyond healing. Every wonderful thing that all of those who were lost would have done, all of the books they would have written and diseases they would have cured and jokes they would have told and babies they would have loved and songs they would have sung and gardens they would have tended -- all lost. Lost forever. And the undreamed of babies of the unborn babies and all that they would have added to the wealth of our souls, all lost. No way to reclaim them. No way to know what we have lost. Only that it was precious.

And the only comfort that I know, is to treasure the people that we love, to hold on to the ones who are left.