I walked recently beside a split-rail fence. It lies over the upper prairie, below the Colorado foothills, like crosshatched number signs all in a row.
I walked so far that my border collie flopped down in the shade of one of the few trees and refused to budge until I sweet-talked him with doggie-up-speak and the promise of eventual water. The split-rail rose and fell, miles and miles of it.
Remember what this looks like: ###. In the end, this column gets more bearable because of it.
Six years ago, two airplanes flown by crazy men crashed the twin towers of the World Trade Center to the ground, the field under the wreckage of United Flight 93 burned and smoldered, and a chunk of the Pentagon fell to rubble.
Remember the flipbooks from your childhood? For those of us who watched it unfold on TV and in newspapers, the images of 9/11 are like that, though the pictures vary for each of us. Flip the pages now. Start the montage in your head. Poke at the hard skin of the scar.
A war, disconnected from the men who bore down on the towers, yet begun in the name of 9/11, still limps along, dragging itself and our loved ones with it – our sons and daughters, young men, young women. Many of the dead are uncounted. But as you read this, even more are dead.
Many of our leaders, many campaigning to be our leaders, and more than half of the advertising and media world think a profitable, successful valid way to get us to accept their various points of view is to scare us all, every day.
They dangle the image of terrorists over our head like puppeteers. They try to sell us by getting us to distrust each other based on skin color, sexuality, gender, age, political affiliation, geographical location, income level, education, religion. They warn that if we don’t do it their way, the bad guys will win.
They remind us, then dare us to forget even for an instant that danger lurks and peers and hides right under our very noses.
They rove around looking for new ways to divide us, making perfectly good words sound scary: Republican, Democrat, red, blue, gay, Mexican, God, Muslim, them.
A lot of us are tuckered out by it all. Six years ago these United States were loved and supported the world over. Sept. 11 brought all the good people out to remind us that there are indeed a heck of a lot of good people. Help and grace rained down from almost every country.
And now? The goodwill has evaporated. We are unpopular with each other and with just about everyone else; we are weary and we are tired of the fighting and division.
It is almost fall. My dog and I are alone after a summer full of hardly-little-anymore boys running, yelping, alighting like firecrackers in a steady wind.
I eye the split rail. It stretches along, holding because of two parallel logs intersecting and locking into a firmly grounded post every 8 feet. Its flow across the landscape sends a message about all of us.
As scary as we can make each other out to be, the good in me is the same as the good in you. What weakens us is our faltering in the face of the fear-flinging. What weakens us is falling for the preaching that only some of us are deserving, true, upstanding, smart or decent. What weakens us is thinking that people love or hurt or bleed differently, when these universals bind us all.
Remember this: The good in us is fundamentally the same. It is why, on this anniversary of 9/11, in this time of realignment and disquiet, we are still OK: We are bound by the same things.
The decency in you touches the decency in me like the logs of the split rail – ###. It’s what holds the fence up.
E-mail Fort Collins poet and writer Natalie Costanza-Chavez at grace-notes@ . Read more of her essays at .
