Woke up a few times this morning, as is usual. At the leisurely pace I live I have to remind myself what each new day is. Tuesday. September eleventh. 2007.

I didn't flashback...waking up to the radio set to a newstation. I didn't think about running to the TV to see it for myself. I didn't think about the silence at ground zero when I visited (made a pilgrimage?) two years ago. I thought about hurting and hating and difference.

Because she's on my mind a lot lately I thought about my niece, and because they're on my mind always I thought about my brothers.

I've been thinking about the things that we have to teach kids, because we try to protect them from the experience that gave us our lessons. We discover innocence in children by way of recognizing an immaturity that we feel responsible for. It isn't merely a labeling exercise. It isn't like pointing to something and identifying it. Along with the recognition comes the pull, the need to do something about it. On one side of the spectrum is vulgarity and outrage - words and deeds we instinctively shun because deep inside where our individual codes come from we understand them to be wrong. And on the other side is innocence and purity, traits we recognize due to our very lack of them and our wish to protect them.

Only... the funny thing is what one person will see as vulgarity will not necessarily be seen as such by others. The same goes for innocence. We react to ideas and trade thoughts in the medium of words but if we actually have identical feelings on a given instance...sometimes I think that's an accident. Maybe an important accident... You see I think we all recoil from the idea of "senseless killing." But in a real sense trying to determine what is truly senseless is subjective. Every person has to feel it in his or her gut. And so is Justice shown to be blind. Ideally, there is only the law. No gut feeling, no sentimentality.

So... how do we explain this to children? Little tykes, by their nature, are pure gut feeling. How do we teach them about the indignity of being held as different due to race, gender, religion, class, sexual orientation and so on? How do we explain the silent violence we do to each other when we let these differences become de facto limitations? Maybe it'll be easier to explain wanting to destroy as many people as possible. Maybe it'll simpler to show how hatred becomes a killing wish. The extremes of violence are perhaps easier for a child to grasp.

It'll be much harder to explain the tiny violations societies have always had. What are the words for not taking a grown man seriously because of his dark skin? How do you explain to a child that the back of a bus was dreadfully hot and miserable? How will we explain to her the segregation her Grandpa Joe and Grandma Betty knew? How municipal codes were written to prevent her ancestors from buying homes in certain neighborhoods, regardless of how much money they had? How children of different colors went to different schools and one school would have money and the other one wouldn't, all depending on the color of the children attending? How do we explain economies structured around the labor by the new and the different? How do we explain the Hoovertowns her Ta-ta lived through? How do we explain schoolkids rubbing her Abuelita's skin to see if the brown would come off? How do we explain getting called a "stupid Catholic" or being placed in the lower English reading level because one speaks both English and Spanish fluently?

How do we make sure to teach her pride at the same time that we explain shame? How do we make sense of fear and hatred at the same time we teach her not to give in and fear and hate others?

Terrorists don't think of the people they kill as people. But as a nation, as a society, we may have encouraged 9/11 with our own policies and reactions. How do we explain unintended consequences? How do we explain consequence? Regardless of who we are, of who we face and the given situation, we do each other violence when we forget the essential humanity of the person we face.