No Perfect Union: As Americans, we can't be a perfectly harmonious society because we have lots of inharmonious ideas

Opinion: Every writer looks back and cringes at some of their past work — what seemed clear at the time is clunky in retrospect, what was once an expression of heartfelt emotion now seems childishly overwrought. But that's not only part of the job, it's part of growing as a writer and a person. The anniversaries of 9/11, especially the imminent marking of 10 years past that day, are annual cases where I look back and find just those things in my own writing. My sentences were clunky, my emotions were unchanneled. I was at a loss for words to publicly express what I felt in the face of a horrific attack that had once been unimaginable. Oddly, it was my private emails to family back home in Kentucky and Indiana — describing life in the city in the days following the attacks, with armed soldiers on downtown street corners and the blanket of politeness that settled over all of us — where I actually found some part of my voice. The annual remembrances of 9/11 stoke many of those emotional memories — a rare moment where being an American outweighed all of our other identities, when those like Jerry Falwell who attempted to divide by laying blame on LGBT people at home were pushed even further to the fringe, when even the most skeptical among us found themselves believing that everything is different now. ... (more)

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