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I'm an advocate of mourning, but I can't say I've really mourned. Well, maybe a bit, at the beginning. The anniversary brings it back; I did feel something, but I hate to say, a year later, that the overriding experience has been that of alienation. It's worse than the early Reagan years. I define alienation as the inability to achieve ecstasy via accepted cultural modes. Tears are the ecstasy of grief, and I don't think I ever cried over it. But I did share in a deep sorrow for the people who died, and for the wound made in our city. Beyond that I find little focus, and now the ecstasy of grief channels into the ecstasy of war-making, and I am sickened. Circumstance has granted the countering voice but little force, and the ecstasy of peace seems far away. This species often displays together its best and its most terrible faces. But these are just expressions, alternating on the same face. Prayers are not to ease the past, but to work eternity into a shape that may explain what is done to us, and what we do to ourselves. If we are finished now with mourning, let us pray for the living.
Pray for peace.
Then work for it.

- alex 9-11-2002 6:21 pm [link] [3 comments]