It's so hard to write about this without it getting washed up in rhetoric, but this is a day that requires...something to be said. In fact, above all things, I wish that talking about September 11th would not be so hard...but I feel like there are two poles between which it is pretty hard to bend. The first one interprets the events of September 11th as a call to action, an excuse for paranoia, or a justification for aggression. The second one, in turn, interprets these responses only as indicators of bad politics, greedy people, institutional idiocy...

...and I'm not comfortable with either of these. I agree that many responses to the events of September 11th have been-- simply put-wrong. But I can't get any farther than that. How could we possibly know what to do next?

For now, all I have is that. And this weird memory of my friend Hannah coming into my dorm room at the beginning of my freshmen year in college, telling me that the Twin Towers and the Pentagon had been attacked.

Please don't mistake this for comedy, but that's all I have to say about that.