Seven years ago, this nation was viciously attacked by a group of Saudi Arabians working out of Germany, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. They hijacked planes and flew them into symbols of America, turning our own industry into weapons of mass destruction. Thousands of lives were snuffed out when the towers fell and when the walls collapsed at the Pentagon. The blood of our citizens soaked into our own homeland. Millions of lives were thus affected by the terror that had been unleashed, and a hitherto sleeping dragon was awoken. The great lesson we learned was this: We are vulnerable.

No one forgets where they were when they heard the news. I was driving to work, carpooling with a good friend of mine, listening to the radio. My normal music schedule was interrupted by spotty (at best) reports of first a small plane, a Cessna perhaps, then two, then perhaps they were actually jets, maybe missiles, then three, then four, then passenger airliners, hurled into the Trade Towers, the Pentagon, the White House, a Pennsylvania air force base. No one had any idea what was going on in Denver. I was shocked, but the tinny noise coming out of my car’s speakers was anything but cohesive.

When I got to the office, the TVs showed the real picture. Terror had landed on American soil. We had only recently recovered from the horror of the Oklahoma City bombing spearheaded by McVeigh. Secretly, we all hoped this was not another case of home-grown terror. Surely this was not another lunatic militia working out of Montana.

The reports got better as time went on. We were all subjected to watching the two great New York towers crumble into so much dust, falling over and over again, shooting plumes of smoke into the atmosphere. We watched as video was combed further, refined, until we could see people leaping to their deaths from the floors above the inferno, people seeking to end life on their own terms, to have one last flicker of a choice in life before being snuffed out entirely. Over and over we watched the video footage. We learned that we can be desensitized to the suffering of our own people.

Conspiracies came next, the fear that this was a known target, or that the US government had planned it all. Grasping at straws, we wanted, more than anything else, someone living to blame other than a six foot tall Arab on dialysis hiding in the caves of Afghanistan. Our government gave us a name, Osama bin Laden, a man who has graced the FBI’s Top Ten Most Wanted list for years, under various spellings. This man would be the target of our malice. We learned that we are hated for our ideals.

For a long time, Americans were united, regardless of political leaning, in the quest to capture those who would hold us hostage in prisons of our own minds. These people would rue the day they woke this dragon.

But something happened then that no one could have predicted. When we should have been paying more attention to what our government was telling us, we paid less attention. As reports slowly, gently massaged our quest in Afghanistan into a quest for Saddam Hussein in Iraq, few questions arose. Surely our government knew what they were talking about. We elected them, it was up to them to lead. We would follow their directions.

And now, today, we are told that our mission in Afghanistan is in peril. Victory, in whatever form that may be, is flickering. Our men and women in both Iraq and Afghanistan are dying, daily, to the actions of other men and women who want us off their land. Meanwhile, our influence abroad has been shattered, as even Britain, a staunch supporter of our foreign policy, shuffles their involvement in our global War on Terror to a mere footnote on an expense report. The Coalition of the Willing has dwindled to a unilateral bloc of American imperialism, a thuggish cartel of militants.

Since 9/11, most of the lessons we learned have been forgotten. We have seen the enemy at the gates, but rather than face them down, We the People of the greatest nation to ever exist simply turned our backs on them. With our votes, we said, “If you can’t beat them, join them,” as our civil liberties were shredded, as legal recourse became a non-event, as we continue to believe that the people who created the greatest problems we have ever faced as a country would surely be the best people to solve them.

As a nation, we fell back asleep. Our vigilance became passive acceptance. The surest victim of 9/11 was our sense of national pride. There will be those who, in the coming days, will attempt to further politicize this tragedy. And they will succeed. And the cherished memory of the thousands who died on that day, and the thousands more who have died since that day will become just a little more tarnished.