via Lydia Pelot-Hobbs.
On the morning ten years ago when we in Sacramento heard the news, I remember my dad driving me to school. Us listening to the radio. I didn’t really understand what was happening (then again, who did?), but I remember starting to cry when I realized that people in other parts of the world live in fear of bombings every day.
What does it mean to hope and pray for a better society, free from imperialist wars, patriarchy, racism, and class, without rejecting or wishing away the current reality?
To me, it means: now (the present) is the best and only time we have in which to try our hardest. To keep building toward the freedoms we wish for all beings.
We may not live to see it, but we can help create it.
Kloncke 
I don’t speak about this very often, but that morning (of 9/11), I stood in a crowd of people at the school district office (where I was at a training for my job back then), and watched the towers go down. I remember distinctly a woman in the crowd shouting “This is happening here,” and out of my mouth, not terribly loudly, but maybe loud enough to be heard were the words “it was only a matter of time before this happened here.” I honestly wasn’t surprised, or even completely shocked by 9/11. It was horribly sad, but so is every terrorist bombing all over the world.
Our peer seminar first readings included this amazing Hammad’s poem. It did quite vividly and quickly bring back images of raining office paper in downtown Brooklyn, where I lived then, and the feeling of ground being erased from beneath. Thank you Katie for talking about the day after, 9/12, the wars we’re still involved in too. It is hard to imagine our Earth in a complete state of peace, however it is necessary to try to imagine such a place.