TheMaddowBlog: History rolls forward, a bit

[babylonsister]

http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/05/02/6569571-history-rolls-forward-a-bit

History rolls forward, a bit
By Laura Conaway
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Mon May 2, 2011 9:47 AM EDT


Union Square, New York City, 9.17.01


My kid was in the womb when 9-11 happened. We'd expected him to grow up looking out of his window in Brooklyn at the towers across the river. This morning at the school lockers, he asked another third-grader if he'd also stayed up late watching the news. "About the 9-11?" his friend said.

The 9-11. The War in Afghanistan. The Iraq War. The Vietnam War. The Second World War. And so on. This is their history. They'll call it whatever makes sense to them.

I don't believe in claiming proximity to events as a way of justifying how you felt about them. In the weeks after 9-11, I heard one downtown New Yorker say that people a few miles farther uptown hadn't cared about it -- even as people a thousand miles across the country suffered real trauma just from watching TV. What I will tell you is that in my part of the world, thousands of people gathered in city parks. They put up signs for the missing and lit candles. They preached their vision of what we should do next, and the one that stuck with me was the vision of no more killing. They were living in a world where death seemed to take over, and they just wanted no more killing, no more of death as an answer for death.

Since then, 2,441 coalition troops have lost their lives in Afghanistan. Another 4,770 have died in Iraq. God only knows how many civilians have been killed. We're so far from being out of this. And yet, somehow, through courage and perseverance, the wheel of history just rolled forward.