It is Monday, Sept 11, 2006 in Corporate America.
Five years ago there was no Ground Zero in the Wall Street district. Five years ago, I saw children on cellphones sobbing in school libraries that were turned into crisis management centres in a matter of minutes, as the television stations carried live the horror in broad daylight on Wall Street.
Every time I cruise by New Jersey's West New York and glance across Hudson River where the Twin Towers once adorned the skyline, I would see billowing smoke meandering across the cityscape of Frank Sinatra's serenade - of the city that never sleeps. New York of 24/7.
I asked myself is this the work of human beings? Which God would permit such a hideous crime against humanity? I recalled Jean Jacques Rousseau's famous maxim "Everything is good in the hands of the Author of Things. Everything degenerates in the hands of Man". I had some answers to my question on good and evil. I needed more questions on how the world was constructed and have culminated since the rise of America as the sole empire of the post-Cold War period. This America - that has also become part of me. The America of Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau.