America - 9-11 Anniversaries

Difficult to concentrate fully this date, seven years after it occurred, on anything but the horrors of 9-11, 2001. My plate's a full one -- at age 85, ignoring as much as possible physical limitations, there's homemaking and caretaking chores for wheelchair-bound spouse, errands to run, unexpected, challenging and not-to-be forfeited professional commissions and opportunities, no matter how late in life they make the scene. I give these matters due attention, but my thoughts are on Ground Zero Manhattan, the Pentagon Washington, and a field in Pennsylvania. Images and cries of anguish from our day of terror have never ceased to haunt me, but on the September anniversaries they're more insistent, more painful.

We're not many anymore but I wonder if other World War II veterans felt what I did when violence thundered from the skies shattering our world. How many years had we believed It Can't Happen Here, not what we saw in Europe and the Pacific, not in our country, on American soil. How many believed as I did that invasion, attacks, skeletal cities and civilian slaughters could lead to what we considered worse than war, defeat. And on our return to a US untouched by scars of combat soothed our wounded psyches with the conviction that fallen cousins, schoolmates and neighbors had not sacrificed in vain, that our country was not bleeding. Those men we loved and lost had guaranteed freedom from foreign attack for the rest of our lives, and possibly the lives of our children and even grandchildren.

Then came 9-11.

Television news accompanies my studio work on this seventh anniversary. The TV set is small, one I listen to rather than watch, but today I occasionally glance up from a sculpture in progress to see the visuals meshed with words. Mostly from the memorial sites, and, despite the grief on faces of gathered Americans, the images reflect little of the horrors we saw on 9-11. It is those indelible images which swim before my eyes. I knew personally none of the victims who lost their lives on that day which changed our world, nor do I dare consider any loss comparable to that borne by their surviving loved ones. But I mourn surrender of my own belief that It Can't Happen Here, and feel betrayal of my fallen comrades who suffered so it wouldn't. Are we up to, in coming years, renewing their dedication to shielding America from Harm's Way.