I have always felt melancholy in the fall, when the rich summer promise seems to fade into the golds of dying leaves, eventually slowing into quiet dormant winter.

Maybe my natural sense of sadness in the fall has colored it, but for me the days between August 29 and September 11 have become a strange time.   Two weeks  to the day is not the only thing that links two of this country's most unnatural disasters,  9-11 and Hurricane Katrina.

But what about them is alike, book-ends holding up a row of similar stories?

Is it that both seemed to come from nowhere, ravage our sensibilities, and then never really end?  To this day neither location has been rebuilt even though both are practically open graves without cover.  Do we "need" to avoid them? 

And what of the uneasiness, from not really confronting the cause and effects of those events? 

In both we blame "the other".   With 9-11, we say we were wronged by religious zealots who hated our culture (but we knew anger about our foreign policy was brewing --we knew we were making enemies --many believed an attack was just a matter of time...). 

With Hurricane Katrina, we blame everything.  The weather of course, but people too poor or stubborn to leave?  And government agencies that failed to act (but we knew the levees were weak --scientists knew the mega-storms would come --city managers knew the disaster plans were insufficient).  

For me it all adds up to an uneasiness at the root of which is just one emotion: fear.

From 9-11 and the build-up to the invasion of Iraq, through the rising tide of pre-emptive Iran "strike" rhetoric, the Bush administration has used fear as a political sledgehammer!  In addition to 9-11 and Katrina evoking "natural" fear-- of unknown and unmanageable forces-- the administration adds calculated fear to influence politics!!

Why aren't the streets filled with angry Americans demanding an end to the fear-beat of Iraq, the malaise of Katrina, the nuclear fear-talk of Iran?  And if not in the street, just vocalizing in loud resistance?

Have we become lazy --or immune to fear tactics? 
Or have we become so fear saturated that we are just desensitized to well-worn issues or cultures--like "Islamofascists" and "illegal" migrant workers?

Do we like the people we have become?
Do we even know, who we have become?

How has our long-term exposure to fear changed us?