The attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, taught us very little that we didn't already know.
We always knew that we were mortal, and at any time could come to a violent end with little notice or warning.
We always knew that despite the historic levels of U.S. military expenditure over the past 60 years, a determined enemy who didn't care whether he survived to live, or fight, another day would always be very difficult to foresee and prevent.
We even knew that the terminal velocity of a person falling from a great height could reach up to 200 mph, if such person chose to dive head first, with their body rigidly straight. And on that clear morning 10 years ago, many bodies were falling out of the World Trade Center. To be more precise, they were jumping.
Sadly, despite the enormous amount of analysis and reflection given to the horrendous events in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C., surprisingly little time in the past decade has been taken to discuss these particular people and the final, decisive choice they made.
We all can remember those pictures of bodies falling from the Twin Towers and then, inevitably, of bodies landing. We saw these people at the point of making their decision to jump and then acting on that decision. One couple jumped hand-in-hand, choosing the 10-second drop toward the pavement, rather than face the imminent prospect of being burned alive.
Those iconic images, which circulated so widely in the days and weeks after the attacks, have now been largely stripped from our collective consciousness. They do not feature in the commemorative broadcasts and publications. They have been set aside.
We don't like to look squarely into the face of people making difficult choices. We prefer our choices to feel clear and morally certain, especially when they are not.
It is a shame that we have set these events outside our ongoing conversation about this day's deep and painful tragedies because these images contain glimpses into the hearts and souls of people forced to make impossible decisions in the most extreme situations.
Some Americans may choose to hide behind the alluring image of "exceptionalism" to blunt the sharp edges and ragged corners of day-to-day life in this country. But there was no American exceptionalism when standing on sills of broken windows on the highest floors of the World Trade Center that day. There were only the same inscrutable dilemmas of life and death that have faced every man and woman, and the same primeval forces of nature, such as fire and gravity, with which we must co-exist as we see our lives through to their inevitable ends.
But we already knew all of this as well, long before the first plane hit the North Tower.
Unfortunately, those individuals who chose as their last desperate acts to leap from the burning towers were not our final encounter with 9/11-related suicides. Soon after these attacks, we launched what has become a decade of war, across a growing list of Muslim countries. And with war comes further casualties, both on the battlefield and at home, when the soldiers have returned to their friends and families.
A painful statistic, which has not been widely reported in either the news coverage or the wider political debate surrounding our "war on terror," is that over the past two years, more American servicemen have committed suicide than were killed by the enemy. Given the ongoing military deployments and activity in Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, Sudan and Pakistan, such numbers are both incredibly sad and surprisingly large.
But this should not have come as a surprise to anyone. We always knew that depression and post-traumatic stress disorder were frequent consequences of prolonged military deployments and redeployments. The full and final costs of any war are always disproportionately paid by the fighting men and women, and their families.
Ten years later, what can be said about the long-term impact of the 9/11 attacks?
Osama bin Laden did not live to see the 10th anniversary of his handiwork, and his assassination by the Obama administration has been one of the few popular high points of Obama's otherwise undistinguished foreign policy.
Although the French newspaper Le Monde has christened this period the "bin Laden decade," such pithy nomenclature places too much emphasis on the act of atrocity that opened the decade and too little emphasis on how America and other nations around the world reacted to that act. The more interesting, and more lasting, trends originate from the latter, not the former.
Since 9/11, America has had to reacquaint itself with a world in which it was a little less secure, a little less prosperous, a little more disliked, a little more scared and a lot more uncertain about what the future will bring.
As the English poet W.H. Auden wrote many decades ago, "The unmentionable odor of death/Offends the September night." Perhaps the one thing we did learn after the attacks was that, as our country reconciles itself to its new place in 21st century, such odors will linger much longer than they once did.