This monumental day - the day we Americans recall vividly where we stood 5 years ago as the reality of what happened to New York trickled through the different layers of our understanding and gave birth to a post-9/11 paradigm. I was sitting in chapel at Geneva College, PA (not far from Somerset, PA) when the news began in sketches. "A plane crash"; "a plane crash into buildings"; "someone flew a plane into a skyscraper"; "the pentagon has been attacked". I didn't process how phenomenally earth-shattering this was until classes were canceled.

So it happened. We went to war angry and embarrassed. We wanted the world to hurt because we hurt. Especially the mysterious and seemingly unfriendly arab world. What a journey it's been, my friends. My personal journey has been profoundly influenced by my country's political actions, because at the start I was a naive and simplistic sophomore in college in my first semester of non-engineering classes. I was committed to liberal arts, which meant I was going to be thinking critically about why rather than how. Now, five long, unpredictable and stunning years later, I sit in Portland's Red and Black cafe surrounded by socialists and hippies, typing on my computer next to a newsstand that reads "Bush pledges to remember 9/11 lessons". I'm not a socialist or a hippie, but I am certainly not the simple kid I was sophomore year. My view of the people of the Middle East is entirely different after having living with orphaned Palestinian and Lebanese boys and experiencing the hospitality of an Egyptian family during Ramadan. My imagination of war is no longer drugged by hollywood's war films, because I have visited a military hospital and seen a 20-year old boy gasping for air through his tracheotomy tube while the remaining stubs of his left arm and leg try desperately to heal from the IED that exploded outside of Baghdad.

Acquiescence is a statement. In the same way that God doesn't cease to exist when we don't think about him, bombs don't stop tearing flesh apart and extinguishing life, and the desperately poor don't get any less hungry when our minds are on other things.