On this month's second anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001, the commentaries were so predictable it was painful. Fluff media offered another round of fluff stories: emotion-tweaking human interest tales celebrating the heroism, compassion, and courage of that day's victims and their loved ones. Among progressives, and seeping in among the edges of larger media, came the political criticism, chronicling the country's military and law enforcement progress - or lack of it in ridding the world of evil.

But even as George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and their Strangelovian troupe exploit 9/11 to make a hash of Afghanistan and Iraq, trash our constitution, and stick our grandkids with the bill, their actions overshadow a more inspiring story. In communities across the country, the basic goodness of people who are human beings before citizens, a goodness on full display after the attacks, perseveres in ways small yet wondrous.

Its an easy phenomenon to overlook, or take for granted. For example, in the days and weeks after 9/11 stories abounded of bigotry, and on occasion violent attacks, against Arabs, Muslims, or anyone that someone (usually white, usually male, usually with alcohol impairing his brain cell) thought looked vaguely terroristic. Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell famously put their feet in it with comments blaming the attacks on the groups of people they think symbolize Americas socially permissive ways; meanwhile, a small army of lesser-known evangelical preachers railed (and continue to rail) against Islam as a tool of Satan, a gutter religion, a religion whose vary nature breeds terrorists, ad nauseam. Such stories made me embarrassed for our country.

But what didn't get reported was how surprisingly few other people shared those extreme views, and how many people actively came to the defense of their communities mosques and immigrants. Even as people one step below dittohead on the evolutionary ladder made it a fearful time for visibly Muslim people, Christian, Jewish, and other non-Muslim church groups spontaneously helped organize vigils and security teams to discourage such attacks. Persons who actually suffered damage to self or property from such ignorant attacks were often besieged with well wishes and offers of material help.

In many places, the backlash would have been far worse; consider the likely reaction of, say, India's Hindus, or Israeli Jews, or anyone in the Balkans--if a similarly enormous unannounced, seemingly motiveless single-day attack occurred there. The popular response could well include mass graves.

Two years later, even as ignorance remains symbolized at the top by simplistic invocations of "evildoers"--there is probably more awareness of and respect for Islamic peoples in the U.S. among non-Muslims than at any previous point in our history. Most of us understand that a handful of people not 1.2 billion of them hijacked those airplanes, and that to judge Islam by the hijackers actions is no more fair than judging Christianity by Hitler. And in communities across the country, various congregations have established cross-cultural links and have sought to educate themselves on a major world religion few Americans cared much about before 9/11.

The organized harassment of immigrant communities by the Bush Administration, perversely, has also encouraged immigrant groups which previously kept to themselves to begin working together and to better organize themselves politically. Here in Seattle, community response to post-9/11 vandalism at a local mosque, and subsequent arrests (aka detentions) of persons wholly unrelated to 9/11, led to the formation of one of the first local grass roots groups in the country to harness both immigrant and non-immigrant support to affected and threatened people. Today, that group, Hate Free Zone, has a staff of a half-dozen and an agenda far broader than its roots. This month, it has spearheaded a national drive that has sent bus caravans from ten cities to Washington, D.C., for an immigrants rights march on Columbus Day weekend.

Pre-9/11, many of HFZs constituent immigrant groups would never have worked together; if cross-national community groups existed at all, they were likely to be cultural, not political. Similarly, the Church Council of Greater Seattle a historically progressive ecumenical outfit comprised of mainline Christian denominations is now (finally) discussing following the lead of similar groups in many other cities and becoming truly multi-faith. The cross-congregational exchanges with Muslim mosques after 9/11 have been a major impetus for the shift.

After 9/11, there was much talk by newspaper editors and network editors of how small the global village had become, and how it was now vitally important to reverse American medias long-standing trend of deemphasizing news of the rest of the world. Once again, in the executive offices such lofty promises were quickly forgotten; if anything, news not directly related to U.S. interests, and scrutiny of how Americas actions are understood and received in the rest of the world has continued to get ever more scarce. But again, ordinary people have figured out what their leaders haven't. Specifically due to that media void, a large and rapidly growing segment of Americans turn to the web and seek out international reporting from British and other English-speaking countries, and from often new English-language versions of media outlets around the world. Even Al-Jazeera now has an English-language web site; Britain's Economist is rapidly achieving an American audience larger than its British one, and so is the on-line version of the UK's Guardian newspaper.

Our networks and politicians may not be paying any more attention to the rest of the world, but many more of us are. The globalization of our news-reading was a major factor in the rapid outpouring in the U.S. of hundreds of thousands of opponents to an Iraqi invasion. Many were armed with information on the speciousness of Bush/Blair claims that has only recently been discovered by the network types in our own country, but was widely available elsewhere at the time.

In many ways, large and small, the Bush Administrations militarized, "with us or against us" response to 9/11 has soured the world on the American dream, and we are the poorer for it. But even as the cartoon images poured forth from the White House, in the wake of 9/11, a large number of Americans reexamined our country place in the world, and began engaging in discussions about how to break not create cycles of violence. That process continues. Long after George Bush and his cronies become a historical embarrassment (or, if it's a truly just world, inmates), we'll be the better, we'll be reaping the benefits: a more informed, nuanced, and compassionate understanding of the world. Under the radar, the work has already begun.