Eric Robert Nolan graduated from Mary Washington College in 1994 with a Bachelor of Science in Psychology. He spent several years a news reporter and editorial writer for the Culpeper Star Exponent in Culpeper, Virginia. His work has also appeared on the front pages of numerous newspapers in Virginia, including The Free Lance – Star and The Daily Progress. Eric entered the field of philanthropy in 1996, as a grant writer for nonprofit healthcare organizations.
Eric’s poetry has been featured by Dead Beats Literary Blog, Dagda Publishing, The International War Veterans’ Poetry Archive, and elsewhere. His poetry will also be published by Illumen Magazine in its Spring 2014 issue.
We were a different country then: wounded, but undivided; scarred, but undeterred; enraged, but not at one another. The America that rallied and unified in the wake of the terror attacks seems as vanished now as the Towers themselves.
We were a nation of neighbors, as though the dust thrust up from a burning New York City had cleared to reveal an even greater Republic. We huddled together under the smoke blowing up from the charnel pit, then reached to lift one another to higher ground. We bolstered one another with whatever words we could find, in the interminable spaces after our dead had fallen silent, after the soot in the emptied streets had muted even our own footfalls.
We rose up as one to retaliate — and struck out across the world with a single fist. We were more than a superpower, more than an aggrieved people. We were these United States.
I want to believe that we can be that country — those people — again.
That is why today, fully two decades later, I will picture who we were. And I will tell myself, never forget.
“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”
— John Adams
Gilbert Stuart, John Adams, American, 1755 – 1828, c. 1800/1815, oil on canvas, Gift of Mrs. Robert Homans
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 