Unedited. I'm thinking of more than 9/11, thinking of Pearl Harbor and mankind's history of destroying its best self. 

I came to work that morning, one of my employees said, "they blew it up." I tried to get some context, but he had no context to give. Just "they" and "blew up" and "towers" and "jumping". I thought he was referring to some local event, though I couldn't imagine what. I worked that morning, as usual, worked on machinery, checked cows and calves, it was fall calving and we were especially busy,—curious what gossip I would learn at noon when I went in for lunch, turned on the news. Those hours between 8 o'clock and noon were the last hours of "not knowing." There hasn't been a day since that hasn't been touched in some way by those events, some inkling or sense that the world was irrevocably changed, that day something was lost that could not be regained. At least, that was true for me, but not true for those who have or had witnessed horrors beyond imaging since time immemorial, this just happened to be in my, our, timeline. What made this indelible was the immensity of the event, the visuals, the surreal images of the planes impacting the glass and steel, how relatively small the aircraft looked, the almost slow-motion coming down of the towers followed by the rising up of the dust and smoke and debris. The physics of it didn't make sense. When I went back to work after lunch, shaken to my core, my first inclination was to hang the largest American flag I could buy on the side of my barn—fight back. I felt a welling of patriotism which was unusual for me, as one who marched against the war in Vietnam. I thought "fight back" was not in me. It was. I even thought that I would be proud if my son were to enlist, the cause that great. Those thoughts faded quickly as the dialog turned political, fingers pointed, blame laid, events distorted by the same media that in all innocence showed us the first horrifying images. There would never be consensus. In typical American fashion sides were chosen, rhetoric became discordant, factions claimed the right to be in the right—the moment passed. The image of the flag on the side of my barn came down. The sense of unity vanished before it ever existed, and the machinery still needed to be repaired, the cattle still needed to be checked, the school play still need to go on, the tv news returned to weather and sports, life returned to a semblance of normal. There was nothing normal about it, it was a new, darker, world.

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