The page has turned.

Another anniversary.

There is a qualitative difference this time around. Previous years were rife with remembrance. Sharp shards of unavoidable history.

But this year, I was hard-pressed to find them. What had previously been a deluge, now a trickle.

Maybe it’s me.

With the extraordinary adaptability of the human animal, I have subsumed you into daily life, feeling not terror, but wariness.

Such a lukewarm legacy. Was it worth it?

I see no time when our beliefs and cultures will mesh.

Enemies eternal. A common view, me and you. I bet it bothers you to share something, anything with the likes of me.

Like children in a schoolyard; one offering his lunch money, eager to make friends, form bonds, buy them if he has to. A little desperate to be liked.

The other filled with nameless rage and bared teeth, hating those whose very existence he feels invalidates his own. Acting out.

You envisioned a roar, but left only an echo.

Part of it is the passage of time.

But most of it is because I love my country with a ferocity that surpasses your fanaticism.

We’re still here.