I really should have written this a few hours ago. About 9:30 or so, I’d say. I was in Wal-Mart when I saw the first images on the TVs in the electronics department. Few people were attending to the screens. Someone had turned the sound up, though, to see more of what was going on.

At home, a friend called and was convinced the world was coming to an end. And, in a way, it did. The idyllic world we’d known for so long here in the US was no more. We, who felt we were above such acts finally had to face what many other countries had already encountered. Terroristic acts  were happening in virtually every other country on the planet — Spain, Germany, Ireland, and of course the Middle East, but not here. And then 9/11 changed that.

An awful lot of people died needlessly that day. For them and their families, I mourn the losses. Our innocence died that day as well. I mourn that, too.

I’ve heard a lot of talk about how the terrorists thought they’d tear us apart but instead they brought us together and to some extent I think that’s true. But, sadly, I do think they won on one level — they’ve succeeded in increasing our unease. They succeeded in making us paranoid. They succeeded in bringing us to violate the rights of our people, and ignore the Constitutional mandates of freedom of speech, and of assemby, and of being secure in ourselves and our papers and our homes and the other amendments that the states felt were so vital to the acceptance of our constitution.

I would like to think that if those many people who died that day could somehow come today and provide their own perspective, they’d condemn the actions we’ve taken in the name of Homeland security as being an affront to the freedoms for which they had to die.