What is this sense of being obliged to acknowledge the anniversary of 9/11? And the other question small in the back of my mind: Is it traitorous not to?

(I don't make the questions, they just appear, and no I don't think it would be unpatriotic. But it's interesting that the question is there: The mind's own sense of trending topics.)

What is there to say about it now, anyway, nine years since? Do we trot out the stories of where we were when it happened? Of the people we know who perished?

How about this: How many predicted then the degree to which the event would crack open the body politic to rouse an underlying fundamentalism? Today, the WTC site has been co-opted by American extremists as justification for their xenophobic aspirations. With that embrace, they have more in common with the men who piloted the planes than they do with the country wounded. As I reflected today on the interval since the attack, I thought of that emergence—how you don't see the fissure at the moment of the split. It has to have had time to break and for a chasm to form. I traced the growth of the divide through my memory of the past nine years and began to think of the future. What degeneracy will crawl out of the blackness of the growing rift?