It didn’t take long once the towers had fallen and the Pentagon had been left bleeding from the gaping wound gouged in its side by American Airlines Flight 77.
The embers outside Shanksville billowing from the remains of United Flight 93 had likely not even cooled before we began to hear it from commentators, politicians — from all corners of the nation.
United We Stand.
The slogan was everywhere: on bumper stickers, the lips of pundits, and in letters to the editor of every newspaper in America.
The attacks of September 11 had brought us together, or so we were told.
In heaps of concrete and steel lay not only the remains of a few thousand of our people but also our political differences, petty squabbles, and childish bickering — all vaporized along with luggage, office furniture, flesh, and bone.
America was now unified, not merely in grief but in our commitment to one another. Osama bin Laden had laid waste to our partisanship and unified us as a people in ways unseen since World War Two.
