This article is something of a confession of sorts. For most of my life I have not been politically active. In fact, in spite of the fact that I love politics and even worked for the United States Congress, I never actually voted in a national election until john Kerry ran for President because I desperately wanted to get rid of Bush. But now, as I begin to consider the status of my citizenship in conjunction with my deepest hopes for the world that I will one day leave behind, it has become increasingly clear to me that silence is a betrayal. And at a time when so much of our lives are filled with the inauthentic artifacts of a meandering culture, the center must hold. That is to say, maybe there was a time when we could lose ourselves in the sluggish extravagances of the American

life, but that time has unequivocally passed. The world is a very different place; and now as we stand in the shadows of our collective preoccupation with wealth and superficiality, we are finding that the experience of being an insignificant king of a forgotten hill will never give us the sense of accomplishment we so desperately desire. We are a nation asleep at the wheel of history. The hour is late and soon the light of the setting sun will move beyond our grasps leaving us with memories of what might have been.

And I don’t care what our leaders say, we simply cannot allow ourselves to become so profoundly trivial that we substitute celebrity for greatness. Being famous on the Internet or having your face on the cover of every magazine in America doesn’t make you important because greatness is an inside job. It happens in the dark. It happens in the heart; and long before we go public we must interrogate the substance of our lives in private; behind closed doors, as it were, because some miracles can only happen when we are alone. This is what 911 was really all about. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 were one of those moments in the history of a nation that rarely come without the shedding of blood. I don’t know what it is about us, but we never listen to life until we are surrounded by death. What is it about death that makes us embrace life so unconditionally? And since we’re on the subject, what is it about life that makes us so oblivious to its fragility that we live as if living is forever when clearly it is not?

Life and death. That’s where we were in 2001. For a few days in the fall of an otherwise uneventful year, an entire nation wrestled with the task of finding meaning in our questions; and for the first time in the short history of a generation we were confronted with the possibility of a defining moment, but instead of reaching for something noble we elected to go shopping. We went shopping. And if that were not enough we did so upon the general advice of our leaders. Or to say the same, in response to the sheer banality of evil we were encouraged to medicate our sorrow with a consumerism.

Nations come and go, but the great ones have at least one thing in common, they repent!