While 2020 seems an endless treadmill of terror the 19 years between today and 2001 seem like a flash that passed with the swiftness of a hummingbird’s dive.

September 2001, I worked the overnight  as a specimen processor at Quest Diagnostics. I ran a machine that took very little active thought and throughout the night usually listened to a ‘boom box’ tuned to a local radio station. One the morning of September 11th, as often happened, the radio’s reception turned spotty and the station alternated between clear signal and migraine inducing static. Just before reception failed entirely, I heard a breaking news report that an aircraft had apparently collided into the World Trade Center.

My first thoughts were that some light general aviation aircraft had lost its way and slammed into the building much like in 1949 when a B-25 Mitchell had struck the Empire State Building. Tragic, people had died, but not a monumental news story.

Unable to get any further news I completed my shift and left for home. At the bus stop, in those years I was bound by mass transit, a young man listening to a handheld transistor radio with a single earpiece pushed into his ear said that one of the towers had fallen.

I did not believe him but kept quiet. So often in the immediate moments after something breaks on national news there are rumors and exaggerations and still with no knowledge of what exactly had happened, I was disinclined to believe the most sensationalist version of events.

Disembarking from my bus I stopped off at a 7-11 on the way back to my apartment and on the televisions playing in the store saw the horrible truth. In that moment it changed from being a ‘news story’ to history we were living through. I called friends and woke them up and as the day passed dread for our future grew.

Since that day, September 11th, 2001, we have been in constant war. Thousands lost their lives and it’s difficult to assess that we have made any meaningful progress since then. The culprits directly responsible have mostly been dealt with but the underlying conditions have scarcely changed and the toll it has taken on our national character, it opened the door for American to be known as a nation that tortures prisoners, it incalculable.

It is no test to be moral when times are good the test is when anger burns the blood, when vengeance enflames the mind, that is when the test truly comes and people discover who you really are.

It is up to us to change the tense of that verb, from who we are to who we were.