5 Years Ago
There are certain defining moments in my life.
The first was the death of my father when I was an adolescent.
The second was my acceptance to school in San Diego.
The third was the kiss that began the relationship that led to my sixteen year marriage with my wife and best friend.
The fourth was acceptance of my new role as a father.
The fifth came on a crystalline blue day 5 years ago.
For weeks afterward I was too stunned to speak. But over time I was felt like the main character in Harlan Ellison’s classic work “I have no Mouth and I Must Scream.”
5 years ago, I had no mouth and I wanted so badly to scream. Three weeks later, this journal was born.
It has functioned as my mouth since I published this piece – still one of my favorites – that takes me back to the weeks following that strike when the world abruptly and irrevocably changed for all of us. It remains poignant and relevant to me today:
In a sense this is an attempt by minds to make sense of the nonsensical. By providing motive to the attack, people feel better. They can take comfort in people having been killed for a reason, that the attack was some kind of message which we now must heed.
The attack was meant to change us, and it did – just not in the ways that the attackers wanted.
It has steeled me to the fight. It has energized me with a fire that I have passed along in these writings and newspaper columns since then.
I have found my mouth but strangely as I remember that day so long ago when everything changed, I feel that the best way for me to remember those who have died in this fight for our survival is to do so with silence.
It’s the best commemoration I’ve come up with so far.
Silence.
But the anger will flow again, rest assured. I have a mouth, and I will scream.
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