We could have grieved with all of our fellow Americans, not just the ones who looked like us, but also the ones who looked like the people we feared. We could have grieved with people around the world and drawn connections between their suffering and ours. The mass killing of three thousand people and the trauma of a world that watched could have sustained a kind of public grieving that expanded our sense of who counts as “us” beyond what anyone had previously experienced. It could have made us safer. Today we might have remembered 9/11 as the tragedy that initiated an era of global
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