What I remember most is wondering what humanity would look like on the other side of Sept. 11, 2001. It troubled me deeply. The attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon felt like payback for a meddlesome, imperialistic foreign policy, part of a vicious cycle that could destroy us all.

As I write this, two years later on the anniversary of an event so horrific that it still hasn’t lost its power to numb me, the questions that haunted me that day are no less disquieting. And there are new questions, among them: Are we safer or more vulnerable?

A post-9/11 wave of nationalism carried us to war, first with Afghanistan, then with Iraq. War is a simplistic approach that empowers terrorists and fuels their hate. Can a war, as we’ve been told, be a “good” war meant to rid the world of the evildoers who perpetrated 9/11 and other atrocious acts? Can it ever be that violence won’t beget more violence?

Martin Luther King Jr. understood the futility of trying to carve peace out of war. In a speech against the Vietnam War, he said: “The past is prophetic in that it asserts that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows. One day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means. How much longer must we play at deadly war games before we heed the plaintive pleas of the unnumbered dead and maimed of past wars?”

Voices like King’s have been silenced in our response to 9/11. A country that spends more on its military than all other nations combined, we’ve spent billions of dollars avenging the terrorist attacks and President Bush wants to spend billions more. Yet, Americans are still no closer to understanding why the terrorist attacks happened than we were on Sept. 12, 2001. If it had been a business that was hemorrhaging red ink instead of a nation that saw its heart cut out, a crisis-management team would have been put to work immediately to determine why the problem occurred and how to prevent similar problems in the future. Would a business perpetrate the same act that wounded it?

In our response to 9/11, we’ve created inescapable ironies. The United States is a country that was founded by those escaping religious persecution, yet the hastily passed and little-understood Patriot Act stifles religious freedom and other civil liberties and sanctions racial profiling as an official U.S. policy.

To hew peace from the mess that has been created, we have to probe more deeply. We have to view Afghans and Iraqis who died at the hands of our military through the same lens of compassion and love that we view Americans who died on 9/11. We can’t separate their countrymen’s grief from our own sorrow for those lives lost on 9/11.

Thus far in our response to the terrorist attacks, hate has won. That’s the real enemy. In years to come, Sept. 11 should become a day when each of us works for peace, in our individual lives and at every level. It begins with us.