I sat at my desk Sunday morning, munching on a cheese quesadilla and some red grapes, and contemplated the war on terror. It was, after all, an appropriate date to do so: September 11, 2005. 

For those not keeping track, that is four years since two planes rammed into the World Trade Center in New York, another plane nosedived into the Pentagon, and a fourth plane crashed in southwestern Pennsylvania. Three thousand people died. Their names and biographical sketches appear alongside their photos at http://www.september11victims.com/september11victims/victims_list.htm. 

On Sunday morning I read through those names. I sat there, munching away, feeling bad about everything. I had seen the names of the people who had died before — in fact, every anniversary of the disaster — but they still hit me like a punch to the throat. 

While I read, I tried once more to figure out what it was that I felt, exactly, or thought, exactly, about the way those people died and the way the United States and the rest of the world responded to it. But all I have discovered as a whole is that I am really sad, though I have been able to decipher some bits and pieces: anger, guilt, and an intellectual frustration that all of those events so effectively thwart rationality.

As a student-member of "the Academy," it is the intellectual frustration I feel most qualified to talk about. I have been taught to "think critically" — to analyze, to dissect, to read between the lines. And yet, here I am, having just written about how I don't know what I think about the most important event in my short lifetime. 

Somehow, through an exposure to some mix of punditry, nationalism, and politics, I've let my brain go. I've accepted a different kind of logic, a logic in which "September 11^th" has become an effective rebuttal to any question one might ask about the war in Iraq, or defense spending, or why people don't have enough food. I used to ask such silly questions, and accepting "September 11^th" as the answer has served me well — it has given my mind a rest.

When I hear officials state that the war on terror — or, excuse me, the struggle against violent extremism — will never end, I am somehow okay with that. When I watch a video of Pittsburgh police tazering a woman who is lying on the ground during a protest rally, I think that it makes some kind of sense. And now, as New Orleans drowns and its people drink toxic water to live, I can only think, "Well — okay — in a post-9/11 world…"

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