Every year on September 11th I listen to all 4 hours of The Disintegration Loops by William Basinski. Part of me never understands why. I'm a bleeding-heart liberal and I cringe at every "Support our Troops" and "Never Forget" sticker that I see. Yet I keep my own solemn ritual of our civil religion. Why?

It was a tragedy that 3,000 people died that day. But it was a greater tragedy when we abandoned the principles of liberty and justice that separated us from our attackers. 9/11 was invoked as justification of some of the greatest sins imaginable. We are financially in ruins. The level of our national discourse and its connection with reality has been damaged for perhaps a generation.

America lost its soul that day, that next morning. Here's the thing, though. We can fight, we can persevere, to build it up again. Repair our moral compass, tend to our economy, educate ourselves. And this year is the first one since that I have felt like we are going to make a first step, come November, towards doing so.

But those other 3000 souls? They don't come back.

I guess that's what I'm marking. That I cannot extricate the two.

A government, since 800 years or so now, is an agreement between people to put the liberties of everyone above the liberties of themselves. In some sense this is purely a practical matter: if we let the strong kill the weak, and then fight it out amongst themselves, there won't be enough of us left to feed ourselves. But mostly, and I think we are a nation that prides itself in being explicitly founded on this, it is an acknowledgment that you deserve rights because you are a soul, not because you can defend them with force, caste, or crown.

That means we cannot toss anyone away, we cannot march into the desert shooting first and asking questions later, we cannot compress a life into a rhetorical device. The rights we defend are not an eloquent argument from first principles; they are an accumulation of sacrifice. And my anger doesn't raise any liberties from the dead.

William created this record, that September, by finding some physical tapes from the year I was born and playing them over and over while their magnetic charge literally disintegrated from use after being stored so long. Everything we value is a piece of what we give up our self-interest for. We create art from loss. But we also create a nation out of loss; this is what mattered, because this is where we failed. The 300,000 that didn't die? We're in this to make their lives worth saving, not to clear the way for them to fend for themselves. All the ideals and fancy words only arise from that.