9/11: The Dust Is Still Falling

It’s September 11, 2008. Seven years since the Al Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center. As I drove to work this morning, a sunny late-summer morning so similar to that day that changed our world forever, I was struck by an odd thought:

Are things better or worse than they were before the terrorists struck?

You might say (and you’re probably right) I’m crazy to even wonder. The dust has settled; the verdict's in. Could it get any nastier?

For families of the more than 3,000 people who died in the attacks, it would be difficult to make a case that things are better than they were after their loved ones were blown up by morons with a mission.

And the rest of us suffer, mostly without complaint, over endless delays and frustrating rules that have become a routine feature of our daily lives. Traveling by air is not fun, if it ever was. But that’s hardly the worst of it. The US is in an apparently endless war on two fronts that has left families devastated; the economy is exhausted, and the bitter divide between liberals and conservatives which was bad enough before 9/11 just gets weirder by the day. Sarah Palin vs. Barack Obama?

Certainly the world feels creepier than it did before 9/11. Before 9/11, we weren’t subject to beheadings on the Internet. Osama Bin Laden is still out there somewhere, despite the best efforts of the world’s most powerful civilization to bring him down. Conspiracy theories haunt us – the graffiti artist’s proclamation that “9/11 was an inside job”, indicates that insanity is not the sole preserve of Al Qaeda.

Some people just shut their eyes tight and wave that flag harder.

Still, I can’t help thinking that we live in a more …careful world than we did seven years ago. At the turn of the century, the biggest boogeyman we could conjure up was Y2K, which turned out to be a small problem with a clock on your computer that was fixed by a patch – duh! Osama, on the other hand, is a real boogeyman who is still out there recruiting mad minions whose sole purpose in life is to kill westerners.

The gap between Y2K and Osama Bin Laden is considerable and the lessons of 9/11 have matured us and made us more resolute. We understand the cost of complacency…and we’re determined that we won’t get fooled again. I would hope the sober resolution that set in after 9/11 won’t be undermined by the hot air and rhetoric that will serve in the place of reasoned debate on the campaign trail over the next few months. I do believe that the stark scar that is Ground Zero will continue to keep the candidates, uh, grounded, and together we will understand the value of our civilization.

That, at least, is my hope on September 11, 2008.

Meanwhile, please take some time to read the three new 9/11 stories posted on the home page this week – our testament to how ordinary people coped with extraordinary events.