“Only when we have lost them do we become sensible of their value; for the want, the privation, the sorrow, is the positive thing communicating itself directly to us.”

Arthur Schopenhauer - “Counsels and Maxims”

I would be far too venturesome to attribute the above quote as a maxim of public sentiment on 9/11. Many years ago, I encountered a series of quotes concerning the long anticipated moment when Americans would drop all references to ethnic identity or heritage and adopt the word that is in essence the vocabulary of our equal worth.

Instead, five years after, we have hastened a retreat to incipient ideological madness.

Lest we ever forget this tragic catalyst, or likely aspect of an event that defies all sense of acceptance and form fits our sense of denial. A denial that every rational and reasonable American mind can only adhere to without definition or want of cause.

In many respects, this lone thought of denial is constructive in purpose and seeks a closure that is wanted yet not attained. It cascades in our minds to inevitably inform us that what we are experiencing is not a common quality but a question of individual determination.

In our time, the lingering doubt may best be expressed as fragile. We have this attained notion that the American experience is written in stone and consigned to a presence of mind that lingers among solid fundamentals. The twenty first century tone of my country reeks with indecision and suffers a paralysis of ideological sentiments:

Fragile as the lady of the harbor,

Fragile as her torch that glows.

Nanci Griffith - Fragile

This concept of fragility is new to me.

If there was ever was single word that defines the nature of the American history, it is solely expressed in our continuity. Break that cohesive band and it all falls to a wayside of shattered fragility. To me, it is a concept of within that suddenly gives us this sense of without–less the concepts exemplified by right or left, but more consigned to the inevitable soul of a true believer waylaid to sights unseen, and privy to a certain regret mired in an unaccountable destiny of malaise.

Americans just may be the globe’s best futurists whose sense of the timeline turned dark and gray, removed to a sense of indiscretion, captured in a realm of limited possibilities, consigned to a substance of intangible worth, soured in an atmosphere where the median is the realm, and the extraordinary is relevant to some pre-consequential pipedream.

We are better than this–the world is better than this. There is never, ever a concept expressed in our worldly view that sanctions neo-humanism, much as the procedural evidence rations a concept for any “writer” to strongly finish, but inevitably close as completely spent.