From the last Morning Jolt of the week:
It’s That Day Again. Is It Becoming Too ‘Normal’ a Day?
Doesn’t feel like 14 years have passed, does it?
I think I’m starting to understand how the Greatest Generation used to feel when December 7 would come and go on the calendar with barely a mention of the date’s significance. On the one hand, life has to go on. We can’t live in fear. Our foes want us paralyzed and overwhelmed by the horrific brutality of their actions. In 2011, the date fell on a Sunday, and the NFL played games.
Today — barring some terrible interruption from the bastards in al-Qaeda or ISIS — the kids will go off to school. We’ll all go to work. High-school football games will be played tonight. For millions of Americans, everything will seem pretty normal. In some ways, that’s pretty remarkable, and a testament to our men and women in uniform, our intelligence agencies, law enforcement, and everyone else with a hand in the tough, endless work of keeping Americans safe.
Some members of the Millennial generation may have clear memories of that day, but many were too young to have really understood what was going on. We are as far from that Tuesday morning as Reagan’s “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” was from September 2001.
And yet, it feels like we’re still processing the lessons of that day. For many of us, the brutal lesson of 9/11 was that we spent our lives walking around believing that unimaginable nightmarish horrors like skyscrapers disappearing in a cloud of smoke don’t just happen . . . and then one day, they did. Suddenly the unthinkable isn’t so unthinkable. And in that autumn, for many of us, the question was whether the future held even worse terrors to come. Chemical next time? Biological? A mushroom cloud on the horizon one day?
By and large, those worse terrors haven’t arrived — although assorted malevolent forces like the anthrax mailer, the Boston Marathon bombers, and the Fort Hood shooter certainly tried. So have we, as a country, been spending the past 14 years waiting for another shoe to drop that never will? Or will it come some day, feeling even worse when it arrives because we let go of that late-2001 dread?