Nine Eleven

This certainly is a day for reflection.

There has been no other news event in my lifetime which so invaded my dreams. I always loved the twin towers, and in twelve years in New York I never understood why so many New Yorkers disliked them. In what now seem halcyon days in the West Village and Chelsea, I knew whether I was going uptown or downtown by where the towers were. Driving home, so many times, on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, as it cantilevers under Brooklyn Heights, I marveled each time at the sheer magic of the lower Manhattan skyline (I was once shocked that two New Yorkers I was driving had never really considered the view). The street level in New York can be pretty dowdy, but the Skyline - the Empire State, the Chrysler, the Towers, the (former) Pan-Am buildings - forced you to rejoice that you were not living in Kansas anymore.

I was in New York two weeks later. I went downtown, and smelled that smell (ground steel, ground computer parts, ground people), and I left as soon as I could.

I give all credit to the administration that something like that has not happened again in the US, and Thank God the enemy's self-regard and desire to have an even bigger "show" next time seems to have prevented them from initifada type attacks on what is still an open society.

But I still feel on edge, vaguely feeling safe living in NE Florida, and I am fairly convinced almost every political decision made since has made the world less safe.