Generation Defining Moment

"This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before."
Leonard Bernstein

Today I heard multiple times that September 11, 2001 will be the defining moment of my generation's life.  Well, I'm hear to tell you that is not the defining moment of my life.  It won't be the worldly moment I remember with vivid clarity.  Like everyone else, I was heart broken for the lives lost, for the senseless violence.  I was praying for the families and more, praying for the fire department, police department, and other volunteers who were trying to dig through the rubble and find people.  I was 18, two weeks into my freshman year at Luther, and I had no concept of the world outside of me.  By the end of the day, I had begun to think about the implications of the tragedy and, more over, I wondered how the U.S. would respond.  I remember thinking that how we responded as a nation and as individuals would say a lot about the caliber of people we were and the kind of country we were.

So what do I remember with vivid clarity?  March 19, 2003.  The day President Bush announced he was sending troops to Iraq.  He didn't talk about going to war, but he didn't have to.  I found out at Eucharist, a Wednesday evening reflective service.  I was stunned.  I cried.  I didn't want to go to war.  The country of Iraq wasn't attacking us.  I don't recall if Eucharist was longer that evening, or if I just felt like time slowed.  After Eucharist, I wandered around campus a bit on my own.  I didn't feel like I could go back to my dorm and act as if it were a normal Wednesday.  I remember walking past the music building, past the library, by the library lawn... and I got angry.  I believed that the President was using September 11, 2001 to fuel support for a war that had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks.  I didn't understand why we were sending troops to Iraq.  I told myself the President had to know something that I didn't... and I tried to find comfort in that.  But it didn't really make me feel better (imagine how I when reports started surfacing that there were no WMD).  Over the period of many weeks I tried to understand.  As one of my friends, who was in the Reserves, got called away to duty... as the campus struggled with supporting the students they loved who were going away to Iraq but yet vehemently disagreeing with the war.  Hadn't there already been too many deaths?

I will not forget March of 2003.  It's the month I realized how much I believed that love, patience, tolerance, kindness, rationality, understanding, hope, and working together were things I believed in with the core of my being.

There are things I get worked up about, many of them political.  But I don't think I had ever been so disappointed nor have felt so disappointed since as I did on March 19, 2003.