9/11: How Bush Has Betrayed Us

Submitted by Rick Perlstein on September 10, 2007 - 7:04pm.

Like everyone else, I'll never forget Tuesday, September 11, 2001. I was living in Brooklyn then, and breathed air polluted by the ash from incinerated flesh. But I'll also never forget Friday, September 14. That was the day my Brooklyn neighborhood held its candlelight vigil. Our bodies spanned Seventh Avenue from sidewalk to sidewalk, for over a dozen blocks. I'll never forget the next morning either, because that's what really made me cry. I nearly broke my neck, you see, from all the leftover candle wax coating the sidewalk. So many people feeling the same thing together: remember the solidarity?

Solidarity. That was America's, and the world's, immediate response to September 11. Christopher Hayes wrote a classic essay on this forgotten word last year. He quoted the dictionary definition: "The fact or quality, on the part of communities...of being perfectly united or at lone in some respects, .esp. in the interests, sympathies, or aspirations."