The return of intimacy

I saw it briefly, just after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Americans removed the walls between them. They were no longer strangers. A terrible thing had happened on our shores, to our fellow citizens. We grieved together and prayed together for a safer future.

But that intimacy — that of a circle of loving friends, neighbors and families — dissipated as the anthrax letters made us fearful, terrorist profiling made everyone seem suspect, and the war became the vision that filled our eyes, pained our hearts and eventually fractured the consensus of the nation.