I’ve been avoiding the television and radio this morning, fearful of the onslaught of words and images that this anniversary will bring. I don’t want to see any stars and stripes, or pictures of the rubble, or yellow ribbons, or bullhorns. I don’t want to hear the language of the GOP convention repeated thoughtlessly. “On that day,” GWB reminded people endlessly in the run up to the last election, “our world changed forever.”

Well, at least until it was changed forever again. As Hurricane Katrina demonstrated once again, disasters change peoples lives, sometimes by ending them. The conclusions we draw about the meaning of those disasters and how we react in their aftermath — how we change — may be the test of our real selves. I was struck by the opening lines in Nicoloai Ouroussoff’s Critic’s Notebook yesterday: “There has been no healing, really. Four years have passed since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, and the road to recovery at Ground Zero looks bleaker than ever.”

He was talking about the planned memorial, and the politicization of the process, and how likely it is that what is finally built will be an ugly, schmaltzy mess, but he could just as well have been speaking of the attacks themselves. Four years later the country has gone to its separate corners and posiitons have hardened more quickly than Ozzy Osbourne’s arteries. Those who believe that Iraq had something to do with the attacks — a position that, on the face of it, seems as laughable as Roman sandal movies I watched as a kid, in which Samson and Hercules teamed up to fight Goliath — want nothing to do with those who think our new all-war-all-the-time policy is just creating new Bin Ladens, with the speed that it takes to grow Sea Monkeys. The two sides look at each other from across a gulf, separated by flag decals and Bush Lies bumper stickers. Everyone else tunes into the next Paris Hilton news and worries about their abs, proving that Osama might be right after all, that ours is a civilization in decline. Nice tan, though.

This morning at 8:48 I was in Ft. Greene Park watching the dogs run. There was no sense of memorial, even by the trees that were planted to honor Frank De Martini, who died helping others out of the WTC. (You can read his widow’s story in “Escaped from New York,” on the Articles page.) I recalled walking up Lafayette right across from where the trees are planted that morning. People were already coming across the bridges covered in ash. There in front of me a man broke down on the sidewalk and started to weep and I stood staring at him, mute, unable even to reach out. Another couple did the same thing, all of us frozen in shock.

I’ve forgiven myself for my inaction in the years since. I still like to believe that I — all of us, really — are capable of reacting differently, with less thought and more feeling. Just this morning I got an email from my sister April, who lives in Kingwood, TX, a suburb of Houston. Refugees from New Orleans were everywhere, she said. “The KW United Methodist Church (only Red Cross station in Kingwood) actually acting like a CHURCH should act and providing comfort and a place to stay to those in need,” she wrote. “How odd. All the other zillions of churches here standing around with their thumbs up their holy butts.”

Kingwood, I should note, is as white as the NO refugees are black. We do not need to identify with people to reach out to them, or ask where the mud or the ash came from, or how it came to fall on them. We’ll all get our share in the end.