@LiseL

Thank you, Lise.

I was kind of shocked when I went back to the 9/11 timeline and speeches. Bush's era seemed so frustrating at the time... and yet we had no idea then just how much civility US politics still had to lose. There are things Bush said and did then, in the immediate aftermath of atrocity, that no Republican leader would be caught dead doing today.

Rough times for human decency.

@MLClark

Bush's words astonished me as well. I didn't remember that at all, which underlines the fact that we can't always reply on our fragile memories, vague impressions and weighty feelings about things that happened even in recent history. We have to always go back and re-read the documents and listen to the voices speaking at the time.

Perhaps when we re-visit deliberately like that, we'll have a better chance of learning from our mistakes so we can do better. Perhaps.

@LaurelGreen

Oh I'm so glad. Thank you for this.

I didn't include it here, but Pres. Herzog had an interaction that reminded me just how hard this is for everyone. He blamed civilians, then backtracked when a journalist pressed... and it hit me then that so many aren't allowed any grace for saying horrible things when they're raw with trauma. It's on record that he said something awful, when no one's had time to grieve properly. We need to have so much grace while holding a humanitarian line.

@LaurelGreen

(The journalist did right, by the way. Pressing, allowing for him to recover. But so often we leap to gotchas and then condemn a person for what they say while hurting. We can and must correct the dehumanizing rhetoric itself, while not leaping to dehumanizing the traumatized people who fall into it in their grief. A complicated concept, but important.)