9/11: Winning the fight, losing the War

So much has changed since that fateful day 17 years ago.  A new generation has no memory of it, the war unleashed on our enemies continues to this day, and as a country, culturally, we've changed.  For those who can remember, in the days, the weeks and months following September 11th, we were absorbed in a kind of unity I don't know that we had ever experienced, certainly in my lifetime, as a people.  We experienced a compassion, courage, sacrifice, that erased the walls of race, mostly, and certainly of party and status.

But those months turned into years.  I recall co-hosting a local radio program at the one-year anniversary of 9/11.  On that, I wondered how long we would experience the unity, the understanding among ourselves. I wondered if we had already forgotten hearts standing united. I remember a caller regretted that could ever happen.

Several years after, I remember listening to a sociologist talk about what drives people together, and what drives them apart.  While not talking about 9/11 specifically, I couldn't help but make the parallel.  He said that the greater the trauma, the closer a society is driven together, but in that same high level experience of trauma, the society, after some time, is driven further apart.  The more frequent and/or greater the trauma, the more dramatic the chasm apart society is driven.  Think about what we've experienced since 9/11 with multiple mass shootings, protests, police shootings-both sides, natural disasters, and uprisings that would only exacerbate the trauma already weighing on our collective psyche.

Does this all sound like gobbledygook?
Have you seen an America more divided than it is right now?

I was born in 1968.  I didn't experience the racial divide of the 1960s, nor would I have been aware of the political unrest caused by the Vietnam War into the 1970s.  I've often thanked God I didn't experience those times, so please, correct me if I am wrong, but this seems unlike those times, even though I have heard it described as the "country coming apart at the seams".  This seems like rage.  A spirit of rage, unchecked, unnamed, excused, and even fanned to higher emotions from people behind keyboards, tweets and posts.

The war began at 9:37 a.m. on September 11, 2001.  We took that battle to their bunkers, thousands of miles away.  And we won the battle, as much as it could be won in a battle stemming from ideology.  However, if the terrorists' goal was to unleash unrest, to defeat a country because of principle, we should all stop and ask ourselves if a divided country is the same thing as a defeated country. We should ask ourselves if we are on a trajectory of losing the war because a nation divided cannot stand.

This I admit to you.  When I stand for the anthem, I am in quiet prayer for healing for this country.  When I place my hand over my heart, I am pledging my life to fulfill the spirit, the dream, the purpose of America.  To see her rise to her full potential, for everyone.  I don't have it in me to hate.  I have no idea what it would be like to be a woman, a black man, an immigrant, or a gay man, and I'm not going to spotlight positions they take to further divide.  I also don't know what it is like to be a Southerner, a soldier, athlete or a police officer.  For some reason, God saw fit to drop this soul into a shell that would have probably the easiest path one could hope for:  a white, evangelical, Republican man from Indiana.  I am called to love every last one of those I am not like, and for me, that means understanding and sometimes extending a lot of grace, just as I hope they extend to me.

We are one people.  We discovered that at 9:38 a.m. on 9/11.  We need to find that again.