Where were you 9/11? Where will you be 9/11?

People know to their inner soul exactly where they were on Sept. 11, 2001. On that day, our personal and the collective American memories of time and place were seared in perpetuity. It was Tuesday; my wife and I were with friends in a small village in Belize getting ready to cross the border into Guatemala.

For the next four days we were trapped or perhaps protected by the dense foliage at the ancient Mayan city of Tikal. Like descending back in time, there was no communication to the greater world. We were amongst the ruins of a fallen civilization wondering about our own.

In contrast, my brother was on the commuter rail from Washington to New York. He had a panoramic view across the Hudson River to lower Manhattan. He and all the other passengers clearly saw the billowing smoke from the north tower. The position of the train and the timing of fate permitted him the unobstructed vista of United Flight 175 plowing into its premeditated steel, concrete and peopled target.

It didn’t matter the location: whether a person was sequestered thousands of miles away in a jungle or exposed on tiny New Amsterdam island. Modern society itself was the mark. Feeling the pain and its own vulnerability, the world came to our succor. A French newspaper declared, “We are all Americans.” Even the Iranian Ayatollahs stopped shouting for a brief moment, “Death to America.”

The headlines of solidarity have faded, and the vile chanting has resumed. In our blind rage we became distracted from capturing or destroying the real villains to pursuing a vendetta against Saddam Hussein. Occupied with various failed strategies in Iraq and Afghanistan, it has taken us a decade to hunt down and kill the mastermind of destruction. The Arab Spring is in spite of us, not due to our armies.

So where is world unity now? We squandered it. Where is our own civil dialogue? We abuse it. Where is our prosperity? We spent it. Where is our security? We are still looking for it, oft times, in the wrong places. Our leaders tell us we are safer, and we pretend. If we didn’t, then how can we justify all we have paid in lives and dollars?

Each generation is given a set portion of time. They own it as much it owns them. It defines them; it is gifted by fate, not by desire. It breeds behavioral DNA. For us who remember, that perfectly clear New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania morning is our moment.