New York came crashing down. A piece of New York died that day.

Did I lose loved ones in the towers? No.

A friend of a friend lost her husband. She is now a widow raising her kids alone.

The area where I live lost many firefighters that day. We are the furthest point they can live outside of the city.

Lots of brave people worked at ground zero.

I heard the stories. I heard what they found. I heard what they saw. Someone showed me their photos while working there.

Then came that first Christmas after 9/11.

A family sends their annual family Christmas portrait. He is FDNY.

You can see the pain in his body, the hurt in his eyes. He was a shell of a man from the loss of his brothers and what he saw. You can feel it in that family photo. You can see it.

Two years after 9/11 I ran into a fireman I onced dated.

You can see the pain in his body, the hurt in his eyes. He was a shell of a man from the loss of his brothers and what he saw. You can feel it in his energy. You can see it.

There are more stories. Very personal stories which I will not share out of respect for the families. It is their own personal stories. Stories of falling with the towers and surviving.

New York came crashing down. A piece of New York died that day. And a piece of the Pentagon. And a field in Pennsylvania.

Every day we lose more pieces.

Even though I never lived in New York and never met anyone who died in 9/11, the tragedy struck me HARD. We had been violated and maimed; sucker-punched in our hearts and souls and we, as a nation, have yet to recover. I don't think, personally, that we ever will.

Evil In Our Lifetime: So many things I thought of when I read that heading. The most obvious and forefront in my brain is terrorism. Our country is still rebuilding from the attack of 9/11 and we are a nation of innocence lost. We are no longer able to feel safe and secure in our homes and workplaces and we will never board a plane or look at a person with even a slightly darker complexion ever the same again. We will be forever fearful and life has been forever changed.

The next thing that came to mind was Internet predators. They prey upon the children and the naïve with ruthless disregard for anything except their own greed and need to take what isn't theirs; to harm and destroy and disappear with nary a trace. They are insidious and inherently evil and it is almost impossible to protect yourself or stop them.

Another evil that has surfaced in our lifetime is increasing drug trafficking and all that 'industry' involves. The murders of those who try to intervene are obvious; but there are also the children enslaved to pick crops, the young women addicted in order to provide sexual gratification for the leaders and then cast aside when they are used up, the poor unfortunates used as mules with bags of powder placed inside body cavities and carted into a country where there is no refuge and no one to speak the language.

I also thought of the assassination of President Kennedy. That seemed to be the onset of the downfall of our leaders and the beginning of our realization that not everything was to be trusted in the government. Since then, we have grown to mistrust everything said or reported, and every action is subject to scrutiny as the term 'politician' is synonymous with greed and corruption and lies.

Let us not forget identity theft and corporate corruption and predatory teachers and mass murders at school.

But what it all really boils down to is a loss of trust. In every situation I've described, the bottom line is that we no longer can afford to have faith. Whether it be greed or lust or terrorism or whatever, we have become a nation that can no longer trust anything or anyone. We have no one to follow, no one to look up to, no one to model our lives after or admire. Except one, and even He has been represented by some who use His good name to pursue their own selfish needs and line their own pocketbooks while professing the Word of God...they are perhaps the most evil of all.

The tv was on, I was home talking to a client about making appointments and saw the live footage. At first I thought it was an advertisement for a new movie, then saw the words "live" on the screen flashing...I paused, asked the caller if they had the tv on, told them to put it on and I would have to call them back. I barely hung the phone on its hook and sunk down where I was standing to sit on the couch that kept me from falling to the floor. I was in shock, no sounds just silent tears and then the sobs from the deepest place of my inner being. I never heard myself like that before. It was the as if the center of my being cracked open and felt like it would not close.

I have friends who served at the site, and personal encounters with others who shared their stories with me. It is a time history has engraved into many hearts and minds, one we will not forget. Thanks spuff. It is healing for me to write this.

It is difficult for a heart not to be moved by the obvious horrors being done in Africa. While there are things happening in many of our own back yards and neighborhoods, the abuse and neglect of humanity in Africa is devastating. How can people ignore the rape of woman and children, the brutal decapitation of mother’s breasts and infants left to die starving while their mothers bleed to death? When there is no respect of life, or humanity on such a level, how can our hearts not be moved into action to do something to help these people? Their cry is not for theirs alone, but for all peoples. The wars we fight with neighbors are nothing compared to the wars we must fight within ourselves to not ignore the cries of humanity of children everywhere.

A most magnificent piece of writing, TG, just magnificent!

The only thing that's different about evil in our time as opposed to man's history is that it's in our faces 24/7 and it's very profitable.

If you consider the phony and destructive wars we've seen in our lives and are still seeing, they're the same old wars of Alexander, Genghis Kahn and Ivan the Terrible. The death and destruction in our time is a helluva lot more efficient, but it's the same garden-variety evil.

Genocide in Nazi Germany, Africa and Iraq? Nothing new there, either.

Murder and mayhem? Hatred and violence? From the git-go of human history.

Lust and Greed? Been there, done that for eons. Mankind has the tee shirt on that one.

Destruction and despair caused by plagues and natural disasters? Whatever.

Our way of life in the developed world is funded by evil. If evil were to go away, the impact to the economy would destroy civilization as we know it. What would happen to the network ratings, advertising revenues, sales of books, and magazines, movie revenues, and talk shows?

There would be massive unemployment among shock jocks, bigots, ruthless dictators and grandstanding politicians. Terrorists wouldn't get a chance to go to Heaven and score x number of celestial virgins.

What would happen to Hip-Hop lyrics if there were no drugs and Ho's? Country songs would be limited to sad songs about the hunting dogs and pickup trucks. Who would buy Blackberries and Ipods?

What would we talk about—positive stuff? Forget it. It doesn't sell. Even on tbd, a post involving cheating hearts (or whatever part of the anatomy) will pull a lot more responses than something upbeat or informative.

Finally, we would not have Good without Evil. Good is not as marketable, but it has a number of significant health and happiness benefits and a negligible carbon footprint.