Lost on Sept. 11: A generation without dragons

Looking back on that morning that began so blue and beautiful a decade ago, we're somehow reminded now of children's poetry. A century before, English poet Francis Thompson had penned these elegant words:

“Know you what it is to be a child? It is to be something very different from the man of today. It is to have a spirit yet streaming from the waters of baptism; it is to believe in love, to believe in loveliness, to believe in belief; it is to be so little that the elves can reach to whisper in your ear; it is to turn pumpkins into coaches, and mice into horses, lowness into loftiness, and nothing into everything, for each child has its fairy godmother in its own soul.”

Such innocence was lost that day.

It's hard quite to describe the depth of our enduring grief.

Even now, 10 years later, many of us can't bring ourselves to take in movies based on the subject. Even now, news video of the airliners smashing into the towers makes us turn our heads. The sense of violation remains so raw and so deep that we find such coverage personally intrusive, even now. Ten years later.

Such innocence was lost.

We went to sleep the previous night in unspoken, childlike optimism. The Cold War had ended. The Soviet threat had crumbled.

At the conclusion of humanity's bloodiest century of inhumanity, at the dawn of a new century of hope, the unimaginable was possibly to be imagined. An epoch of harmony, we dared to dream, was very possibly at hand. Our children, and their children, and their children's children had a chance to live in peace.

A generation without dragons, this was the children's dream we dreamed the night before such dreams ended.

There are many who suggest that was the lesson of Sept. 11, that we were too much like children, gullible and naive, going about our days in a sort of happy obliviousness while others noisily plotted our destruction.

And certainly, there's substantial merit to the core of that argument. We didn't pay heed to plentiful warning signs; we didn't do enough to secure our borders; we didn't use simple common sense.

Those are important lessons learned, and there is evidence enough that even now we haven't learned some of them powerfully enough.

Even so, permit us this caution: Embrace at cost the urge to condemn the child that lurks in all of us.

The death of innocence is not a death to be celebrated!

How, after all, are dreams of any length to be realized without there first being a childlike dreamer to dream them?

“That's what it takes to be a hero,” Irish journalist Lise Hand once said. “A little gem of innocence inside you that makes you want to believe that there still exists a right and wrong, that decency will somehow triumph in the end.”

Isn't this, really, the ultimate dare set down in the unconscionable attacks of Sept. 11?

Extremist leaders once disdainfully predicted our defeat on the basis that “Americans love life too much.”

It is not, as some have tried to make it out to be, a conflict between religions or between religious ideologies.

It is a contest between those who proselytize death, killing innocents and recruiting neighbors to wrap themselves in explosives, and we who unashamedly believe in life, in love, in believing and in human decency.

And we — like ageless, resilient children who still hear the elves' whispers — have to believe that decency will somehow triumph in the end.