'But recall, too, the hour of human decency.'

[Are_grits_groceries]

In Love With Death
Years of grieving and war. But recall, too, the hour of human decency.

<snip>
Climb the ladder of years, and the view from a decade up is startling. On the near ground, you can see the rubble and loss of war in a place where we had no quarrels that could not have been managed otherwise. In the distance, you can take in the earliest response to 9/11, by men and women who helped one another that morning, who used their last calls to speak of gratitude and love.
With a single glance across time, you behold the profane and the sacred in all their contrapuntal power.
Mounted on the horrors of 9/11, the war in Iraq multiplied them; dead innocent Iraqis succeeded dead innocent Americans at a ratio thought to be more than 30 to one. Yet the only unambiguously useful responses to the day — as we know now, after 10 years, tens of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars — were made in those early minutes, in deeds not visible to the outside world.
<snip>
They saved a day that could have been defined only by hate from the sky, instead of by the communal decency that resisted panic and reigned in the name of civilization.
<snip>
In much the same way that Anne Mulderry would name the peril of falling in love with death, William Butler Yeats wrote of an earlier, bloody era in

“Meditations in Time of Civil War.”

We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare;
More Substance in our enmities
Than in our love
<snip>
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/08/us/sept-11-reckoning/dwyer.html

Everybody needs to feed their hearts with more love and charity for other.....

(The entire essay is well worth reading.)

[secondwind]

1. Yes, it definitely was... thank you so much for posting this.