In the years since 9/11, the event remains raw

Turn on the TV," my friend said quietly, fully aware that what was happening could not be conveyed quickly and completely in words.

Shaking off sleep interrupted in the deep morning hours by the ringing telephone, I did as the caller said.

The images on the screen that Tuesday 10 years ago were astonishing, bewildering, terrifying.

Ten. It’s a good number, convenient for calculation, suitable for commemorations and anniversaries. In the news business, 10 lends a weight that threes and sixes don’t quite have.

One is too fresh for clarity; 10 supposedly allows for distance and perspective.

Yet, in the years since Sept. 11, 2001, the event remains raw, perhaps because of the hurtling changes the nation and world experienced in its wake.

Wars begun after the terrorists’ attacks drag on and on. and though their trajectories have curved and angled through the decade, they have weakened the sense of national unity that emerged after the tragedy. Not even the killing of Osama Bin Laden nine years and eight months later could bring back that solidarity.

Although the wounds to New York City, the country’s financial hub, have mostly been healed, at least visibly, the larger economy since then has stumbled badly.

What is difficult to evaluate is whether the attacks have damaged the outlook and attitudes of Americans, whether the hostility of a small group of extremist outlaws far from U.S. shores has somehow been implanted within.

Because what we have today is a poisonous political atmosphere where facts and rational thinking have given way to artificial beliefs and ideologic deception.

Impulses to exclude and separate overwhelm accommodation and assistance.

Winning a partisan battle has become far more important than forming a compromise that pulls the country forward.

The ideal of caring and sharing has deteriorated into a conviction that what others have steals from me and mine.

Ten is a good number. Maybe in another decade, the brutishness from still-tender injuries will have dissipated. Maybe in 10 more years, equanimity will have returned.

I’ve not much cared for marking anniversaries; oftentimes the ceremony feels obligatory and inauthentic. But come Sunday, when a full moon rises over the Earth, when people who lost children, husbands, wives, lovers, friends, co-workers, acquaintances and others they cared about in falling walls of Manhattan skyscrapers, the burning crush of the Pentagon or in a metal fuselage mangled in an open field, the observance will be genuine, in part to honor the dead, in part to lament a vanished graciousness.

Cynthia Oi can be reached at coi@staradvertiser.com.