TomPaine.com -- a liberal advocacy organization -- distributed a public
call on August 12, 2002 for 300 word "opinion advertisement"
similar to those that the organization had been running regularly in the
op-ed page of The New York Times. (see text
of the submission request)
TomPaine.com asked that the essays address one of the two following themes:
"Agenda Interrupted" -- What happened to the issues that were in the news in the days leading up to 9/11? Have they come back? Will they ever come back? Do they matter now or will they ever again? While the nation's attention was understandably distracted, how did those issues change, if at all?
"Toward A More Perfect Union: Lessons Learned - Or Not - Since 9/11" - If 9/11 was a wake up call, then what did we see when we opened our eyes? What have we learned, if anything, about democracy, our standing in the world, or the conduct of foreign policy? Can we salvage anything good from the wreckage and pain of such a reprehensible act?
TomPaine.com received hundreds of submissions from the public, most of
which the September 11 Digital Archive has preserved here.
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September 11th caused in us, as a nation, a tremendous insecurity. Like children afraid to sleep when there is lightning and thunder outside our windows, we have wished for the government to stay with us. There's only one problem: we aren't children, and the...[more] 
"Toward A More Perfect Union"," Why I Hate America 12/13/01 I¡¯ve been asking myself why I hate America, why the anger rises up when I hear words about America¡¯s triumph over terrorism. Why am I so perverse when America is doing so much good and is being...[more]
September 11th, 2001 marked the end of national media attention to Election 2000: there was a sense, in the dog-days of August 2001 that the 'official' line of 'just get over it' was crumbling and that the greatest political crisis in the U.S. since Watergate was about...[more]
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When the World Trade Center fell to two kamikaze jet liner impacts, we were told that ""Everything is different."" I say nothing is different, especially our inability to acknowledge or learn from our mistakes. We proclaim our support for Ariel Sharon as a ""man of...[more]
An astute book reviewer in Salon noted that, when thinking of historical monsters,* it is easier to believe in the evil of the beast than in the meanness of one man with access to massive mechanisms of destruction. Just as Hitler might be no different than a...[more]
British journalist Robert Fisk has been among the most insightful commentators since September 11. In an essay focusing on the West’s history of broken promises to the People of the Middle East, he remarks that ""The problem, I fear, is that without any sense of...[more]
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