All week I've been trying to ignore the ever-increasing frenzy about the tenth anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks. The more I hear, the more silent I want to become. Yes, I remember what I was doing that morning. I was sitting at my desk editing when my friend Allison called to tell me what had happened. And yes, my first response was horror and fear and a desperate, irrational anxiety about my children, one of whom was at school interrupting his second-grade teacher without raising his hand first, the other of whom was watching Teletubbies and spilling American chop suey down the front of his overalls at my friend Tina's house. I had no reason to fear for them, but I was terribly afraid.

Three of my classmates at Haverford College were killed among the Cantor Fitzgerald casualties. Several of the terrorists made their way to New York by way of Maine. Friends who were living in Brooklyn recall that the sky was filled with ash and paper for days. It was a terrible moment. Yet Americans, as is our wont, have translated this violence into an exemplar of singular and specific American suffering. For the most part, the students I teach have almost no comprehension of the history of terrorism beyond their own borders. When I introduce them to Wislawa Szymborska's poem "The Terrorist, He's Watching" and then tell them it was written in the 1970s, they are shocked.

So when anniversaries such as this one come around--these public moments that herd us once again into bovine Americana--I don't find myself rallying around the flag. I love my country and I grieve for our loss. But I also grieve for our blindness and our ignorance, and for the way in which we continue, as a people, to celebrate these flaws as strengths.