By Ramzi Kysia

I lay in bed in the mornings listening to a wind that drowns the call to prayer and whips at my windows, “wake up, wake up, wake up.” But even awake I can’t shake the nightmare. Corpses piled high in the streets. This is Baghdad at the end of 2001 - soon to be the city of the Dead.

I was in New York City on September 11th, and the one source of hope I have today is in how generous the people of New York were after the terrible attacks of that day. I take comfort in the feelings of brotherhood and sisterhood that I overwhelmingly felt in the aftermath of that terror. And I take comfort in the cries for peace that I heard and saw as well. The messages scrawled on sheet after sheet at the peace shrine in Union Square read, “We don’t want a war,” “Give peace a chance,” and, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”