Tuesday morning, five years ago.

Everyone remembers where they were. I’ll never forget my friend Mark’s phone call, rousing me from a dazed sleep with the surreal cry, “We’re under attack!” Running to turn on the TV. Watching in real time as the second plane hit. The shock and terror and grief, the chills and pride as we learned of the heroism of the passengers on Flight 93.

I stayed home that day. I was working at a major studio – a factory assembly line, you might say, for the global creep of Western culture – that, sure enough, ended up on the FBI’s list of targets receiving credible terrorist threats. I went to the Japanese teahouse in the park and fell on my knees in the grass in tears, asking god aloud how we and our beautiful planet could survive the hatred and brutish stupidity and avarice, the cycle of violence and vengeance, the world’s blind howl of suffering. I thought about the power and the absolute necessity of art to remind us of humanity’s highest strivings. I added a quote from Leonard Bernstein to my email signature: “This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.”

It was the beginning of the heated bumper sticker debate that waged across the nation. You could frame it, broadly, as red state vs. blue: on one side, “God Bless America,” “Power of Pride” and the Stars and Stripes waving in dizzying profusion. On the other, fewer but brave, “Peace is Patriotic,” “War Is Not the Answer,” and a peace sign superimposed on the earth. “Why do they hate us?” everyone wanted to know. “Because of our freedoms” was the disgracefully trite answer lobbed as a smokescreen for the poverty, inequity and despair in so much of the world, fueling fundamentalism and colliding inevitably with the arrogant fist of imperialism.

September 11th burst our protective bubble. It forced us all to contemplate bewildering questions of evil, safety and security, injustice and ignorance, what it’s like to live in fear, the double-edged sword of free will, the atrocities committed in the name of religion, the challenge of choosing compassion and forgiveness, the incredible gift and responsibility of our lives on earth. I wish I felt like things were better, five years on.