"But to talk about murder victims as patriots ready to make the ultimate sacrifice is to inadvertently give credence to the motives of their killers."

An honest examination of the way in which our country grieves publicly, post-Oklahoma City and post- September 11. As harsh as they may seem, his words need to be heard if we are ever to fully heal:

"When people have died a sudden, violent death there's an understandable impulse to replace the senselessness of the violence with some kind of meaning. But, as Linenthal writes, an act of mass murder is not a conscious sacrifice for a nation. You can speak of sacrifice when talking about the cops and firemen who went into the World Trade Center knowing there was a good chance they wouldn't come out. And you can speak of it when describing the people who chose to die on the plane that was crashed in Pennsylvania to prevent it from reaching its target. But the office workers who died at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, like the people who died at the Murrah Building, died for nothing, sacrificed not to their country or for freedom but to the fantasy lives of madmen. "