here were my 9/11 thoughts five years ago on the 20th anniversary Twenty years of war. It’s hard to sit back and reflect on the legacy of that horrific attack on America, two decades ago today. I was in NYC, got a phone call about the towers, ran outside into the streets of Queens, and found people gathering not knowing what to say or think. All of us shocked, stunned, scared. Not long after I would drive to the Manhattan Bridge, where thousands of people were escaping from the chaos. I climbed a light post trying to find my then girlfriend in the throngs, who I later found in a local car dealership, shaken. The phones were bad because of equipment that fell along with the towers. When I could finally get my voicemail, there was a message from my Dad desperate to know if I was okay. I called my parents to let them know that on any other day of the week I would have been driving near the towers around that time, heading to class at Union seminary. But not that one day, when I’d be in Queens. Dad cried. The other message was from a friend: “Dude, are you alive? Call me if you’re cool.” I still remember laughing out loud despite the mess of the moment. That voicemail was a gift. Twenty years of war. I remember those early days, weeks, and months. The country came together. We would get through this, we would never forget, we would survive this profound wound. Everything was raw. So much anger, pain, confusion. I recall late one night visiting friends in NJ not long after the attack. I turned a corner on the way there to be blocked by huge camouflaged sandbags and flares - apparently a road now off limits because of a local nuclear facility. On the radio, those well-known notes of Jimi Hendrix’s Star Spangled Banner played right as I was staring speechless at the roadblock. I burst into tears. We marched to war. We hunted down Al Qaida, we got Sadam, we got Bin Laden. Of course we did - the most powerful military force in the history of the world was never going to fail at our mission. Our brave and steadfast soldiers, our cutting edge weaponry, our hundreds of billions in defense dollars would not be denied. We would show the world that the attack would not go unanswered. But in twenty years of war, we lost ourselves. I’m not talking about the inevitable withdrawal from “nation building” in Afghanistan. We should have known better with that foolhardy nonsense, but perhaps we do now. No, I’m talking about the loss of the American Soul that started almost immediately after the attacks and only metastasized over the years. The Islamophobia that became xenophobia. The idolatrizing of the American flag that became a ubiquitous reminder of how symbols can go bad. Our culture changed, grew harder, colder, angrier. We had an opportunity, you see, after the attacks to bring the world together. Don’t you remember, those early months after 9/11 when it seemed near every county on Earth stood with us, felt with us, cried with us? A real world leader would have taken that moment to unite the globe. But no. In our rage, we pushed everyone away, rustled up some freedom fries, and we went *our* way - alone, needing no one, demanding whatever we wanted. America wanted no real allies, only schoolyard sidekicks. The cresting wave of true globalization began to break that day, the chance to unite the people of Earth - beyond our economies, beyond our countries - that had been building for years met the force of our resolve to go it alone and began to roll back. And so we failed. We lost the real challenge of the moment, and instead settled in to twenty years of war. War abroad and war at home, as our rage and isolationism began to slowly but surely change our people in ways we didn’t see until the last few years when we finally had to admit what we had become. Our enemies won - they struck a wound so deep we have never recovered.