Divorced...

Eight years ago we vowed to never forget the numbers - 9/11. The day rocked our notions that we were untouchable, that our defenses were impenetrable and we said that we would never forget.

We vowed that our lives would never be lived as they had prior to that dreadful day. For a few days, maybe for a few weeks, there was a sense of unity and our petty differences we once held with such high import and magnitude suddenly lost their vigor.

Now eight years later, we seem to be back to the same mentality we had before. It seems that we are more divided, more godless, today than ever. We have broken the vows we made with such passion on that fated day that now only lives on in faint recollections of where we were when we heard the news.

We've divorced ourselves again from God.

We began living again with our entitlement attitudes that someone somewhere owes us something; we live as a nation with diluted ideas of guarantees of belongings and possessions. These ideas of guarantees to stuff - fine homes, cars, things in general - are not guarantees at all. They are blessings... not rights. Billions of children today won't eat. Billions of people in the world do not have access to clean drinking water. There are toddlers this morning who woke up in Indian streets with no parents to care for them because they've been discarded. They will wake up on city sidewalks and make themselves busy with the business of begging for scraps and change just to survive.

It's ever apparent that we missed the message on 9/11.