Photo: Linus Gelber

There isn’t really anything more that can be said about that day five years ago that brought death and terror from the air and catapulted America into a spasm of fear and remorse that continues to the present hour.

All attempts at profundity fall gravely short. We haven’t heard a speech or song; seen a movie or play; or read a book to capture the loss as eloquently as those words spoken by a victim’s wife,husband or child. We live in an age of the anesthetized.

Architectural plans to build where the World Trade Center once stood are glossy and vapid, fittingly so, because we can see right through their glib and insincere sentiment. “Liberty Tower”? We don’t need a tower of liberty. We need a land of liberty.

We thought we were remade on September 11, 2001 but instead it was our national face made clearer. We cry for ourselves and mourn our dead, but we cannot cry for the Iraqi hundreds who die each week, financed by our own dogma of deceit that gave another suffering nation a new civil war, bedlam and atrocities.

All day the national American commemorations played on and we remembered the tragedy of how life was pulverized in the name of an odious ideology. Did thousands die in vain as they plummeted from the windows of the World Trade Center? Are others dying for no reason as we attempt to make-over another nation that had nothing to do with 9/11?

Our best pre-emptive policy might be to pull the curtains across our own windows and go back and clean our room before we attempt to remake the world. There yet might be an hour for refection: not becuase of the fall of the twin towers, but due to the fall of our own righteous might and arrogance.