Showing posts with label 2001. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2001. Show all posts

Monday, September 12, 2011

All that heaven will allow

It is now 9/12. After all the 9/11 hype, after all the ceremonies, after all the memories and all the tears and all the politicians' words that already have been forgotten, all the 9/11 tribute that was needed was all that heaven would allow.

Thousands have spent millions trying to memorialize that which befell us a decade ago -- those lives taken from us, the death of what we were and the difficult birth of what we now are -- and have fallen short. Still, we seem somehow out of tune.

After everything, amid all the unending promotion
(and, indeed, way too much unseemly wallowing and sad pandering) we basically had nothing. Or at least not nearly enough amid much too much.

But it was a year ago last night that a Spanish musician, photographer and Twitterer who mightily loves New York looked up. He took the shot. And John de Guzmán thus captured what all the politicians' speeches and all the media's stories could not. In the blink of an eye -- the click of a camera's shutter.

They needn't have bothered. What was needed was already done.

The photo, unsurprisingly, has gone viral. I just thought the man behind it deserved a little credit for capturing what all the rest of us could not -- or would not.

Friday, September 09, 2011

3 Chords & the Truth: 10 long years


Ten years.

You know what I'm talking about. It's been 10 long years, and the media has kicked into overdrive obsessing about it. How much they're actually
reflecting about it -- that awful Sept. 11 and what has transpired because of it -- remains to be seen.

This week on 3 Chords & the Truth, we're going to take a stab at reflection. For a bit. We're also going to take a stab at not overdoing it.

Now
that's countercultural. One thing we've not become over the past decade is more circumspect. Or less prone to excess.

AS YOU will discover on this edition of the Big Show, I have some thoughts on 9/11 and the last 10 years of fear, division and endless war. I'll save that for the program . . . give it a listen, will you?

But what I will share with you now is this: We've made our bed in our response to that terrible day, and now we have to lie in it. Part of that is each one of us trying to make the best of a suboptimal situation.

And part of that is trying to be better people tomorrow than we were yesterday -- making this land of endless war and domestic troubles less of one than it has been.

Find joy where you are. Find God in those around you -- even if they're different than yourself. (Hint: So is God.)

Take joy in the simple things, like music. Maybe even in the Big Show . . . it would make my week if you did.

NOW, if you will excuse me, I'm going to take a bit of my own advice. I'm going out for coffee with my beautiful wife on a fall-like Friday night.

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.