Like thousands of other Americans I have just finished watching ABC's docudrama "Path to 911. It has left me feeling numb, and reminds me how I felt the morning of September 11, 2001, as I watched with millions of Americans, the shocking images of our country under attack.

I was out of town at the time, traveling between Milwaukee, Chicago, and Saint Louis as part of an IT hardware upgrade the company I worked for was undertaking. We had flown to Milwaukee, done our laptop upgrades over a day and a half, and then drove to Chicago for the second stop on our whirlwind tour. There were a half dozen teams just like ours doing the same thing in various regions of the country. September 11, 2006 we found ourselves working the second migration at a hotel in a suburb of Chicago. In a banquet room full of old and new laptops our team was busily preparing the old for data transfers to the new.

A female security guard suddenly appeared at the door and said in a panicky voice, "A plane has just flown into one of the Twin Towers in New York." We looked at each other in disbelief, and then went back to work. I remember sitting there trying to figure out the meaning of what I'd just heard. "Maybe it was an accident. Those towers are big. Maybe some klutzy pilot had a heart attack and flew into one of them by accident." My work seemed to slow down to a crawl as I tried to make sense out of the news. And then, the woman was back, "Another plane just flew into the other tower!"

A sinking feeling came over me as a realization formed in my thoughts, "This is no accident. This is terrorism." Our IT team conversed among ourselves about it all even as we tried to maintain some semblance of work activity. But my need for more information got the better of me, so I left the room and made my way to the bar where people were gathered around a television set where CNN was playing out the unfolding horror at the Twin Towers. Soon there was word of another jet bombing - the Pentagon had been hit. No one had to tell me, we were at war.

Then, the first tower fell. And with it, so did my internal emotional fortitude. I needed to get alone somewhere fast. I made my way back up to my room, and once inside retreated to the bathroom, where I broke down and wept for all of the innocent lives that were just lost before my very eyes. I prayed for the people at the towers, at the Pentagon, and for our nations leaders. After a few minutes I reunited with my coworkers, we completed our tasks in Chicago, and then drove on to Saint Louis and finished the job there too.

For a time America was one nation. Political infighting was put aside. There was first the business of self-defense, and then retribution. And then, quite suddenly, there was another assault. America's fear factor rose another notch. The television again rang out in panic - ANTHRAX! Several more weeks of uncertainty and fear ensued before the second assault subsided and disappeared just as mysteriously as it had first appeared.

As the weeks crawled by I began to notice a change in tenore. I first noticed minor criticisms and snipes against President Bush and his administration foisted by Tom Dashel. I remember feeling utter disgust that Dashel would put his political interests ahead of the good of the country. It wasn't long before there were other political attacks, and congress began to make war within itself again as the President tried to get legislation passed that was designed to help us fight the new war on terror. Oh, the Democrats put up a good show about protecting the rights of Americans, but it was obvious the real motivator to the political infighting was pure hatred of George Bush.

There was plenty of hatred to go around on both sides however. They hated Bush. We hated Gore. They hated Cheney. We hated Dashel, or Kennedy, or whoever else was in the way. It was then that another sinking feeling came over me and a new realization formed in my thoughts, "These guys are going to get us all killed someday. They care more about their political ambitions and turf wars than they do about protecting our country. Our politicians will end up leaving a hundred open Avenues for UBL to smuggle more of his killing thugs into the states. And we're going to wake up some day and find that one of our cities has been nuked. God help these b*st*rd politicians then!"

God, help us all. We as a nation have a hundred different fronts to fight this war on, and a lot of them have to do with what's going on within each of us. Political ambitions. Power grabbing. Ideological prejudices. Political correctness. Blatant stupidity. And, overt hatred of each other. Welcome to dysfunction junction - the good 'ol U.S.A.

No, I'm not one for throwing up my hands and walking away from it all. We do need to keep trying to find common ground, keep talking, look for common sense approaches and solve problems. But we also need to repent...of hating each other, of putting our ideologies ahead of our common welfare. Frankly, our lives depend on it.