Sometimes, I listen to music to help me make sense of what’s going on around me.

After yesterday’s events, none of the music I own really seems to fit. The only song that seems to have enough hope in its own quiet grandeur is the title track of Dar Williams’ Mortal City. While that CD is in occasional rotation at work — it’s one of the few CDs from my collection I’ve bothered to make MP3s out of and transport to the office — it’s songs have to jostle up against many other songs in my playlist. But after yesterday, I’ve listened to it no less than three times. And, since the song clocks in at over seven minutes, this means I have given at least twenty-one minutes of my life listening intently to it, nearly crying each time.

This is the only song that really makes any sense. In Raleigh, there are so many people trying to donate blood that there is a ten day waiting list at the local blood bank. So many people who want to give a part of themselves in the hope that they might make a difference. In Williams’ “Mortal City”, the citizens dutifully turn their power off to help the hospital: a gesture that echoes the same sentiment, albeit without the same lightheadedness which comes from giving a pint of blood.

As Americans, we are distracted daily by the trappings of a rabid consumer culture out of control, not giving very many of our thoughts to what is happening daily to so many people all over the world, every day.

Now, we are waking up, as if from a very bad hangover, wondering how silly it was for anyone to believe that a missile defense system, even if it worked flawlessly (which it doesn’t, not by a long shot), would have saved those people on the planes from being used as innocent payload in guided missiles disguised as four separate passenger airliners. Did we ever really believe that we need not pay attention to the rest of the world? Did we ever really believe that we were always the good guy, that it was crazy for people to hate the glorious United States of America so much? Did we really think that we were always untouchable? Did we all forget our own frailty, sipping our lattés and intellectualizing the world outside from inside the walls which, up until 11 September 2001, we thought were impenetrable?

The only thing that makes sense anymore is that, under all of our own preening and posturing, we are human, and we want to help those who have suffered. A pint of blood is a small price to pay; far smaller than the rescue workers who gave their own lives trying to help those trapped in the World Trade Center moments before both towers imploded.

Smaller than the thousands of people who are giving their lives in their own struggle to merely survive every day, all over the world.

And so, I listen to Ms. Williams sing a song of a quiet evening during an ice storm, where two strangers meet for a dinner date in a cold apartment. The woman who rents the apartment has turned off her electricity to give it to the hospital. She and her date end up staying there all night, trying to stay warm, listening to the pelting of ice against her windows, and hearing the faint murmur of a thousand hearts of the sick and those that care for them beating outside, at the hospital.

This is the human spirit, acting on a small scale, only hinting at the wonders we are capable of doing. This spirit is not a product of a wholly-owned subsidiary of America, Incorporated, as our current president would suggest. It belongs to each and every one of us.

“We are not lost in the Mortal City.”