We used to say that September 11 changed everything. And so it did — although, as we discussed on Charlie Cooke’s podcast, the world hasn’t stopped changing since then. But it didn’t just change things in general: It changed our lives individually.
I was there on September 11, and it had some immediate and direct effects on my day-to-day life: They blew up my office, so I had to work in Midtown for the remaining 18 years of my legal career. It had secondary effects as well: I had panic attacks for some years after, and it was many years before I could sleep on an airplane.
But it also had broader effects. I was a political op-ed columnist for our weekly campus newspaper in college through my graduation in 1993, and that set me up to start writing an unpaid weekly baseball column seven years later on the internet for Bill Simmons, who had been the paper’s chief sports columnist and was, in 2000, running his own “Boston Sports Guy” website on an AOL subsidiary. In September 2001, after Bill got hired by ESPN, I was writing the same column for the Providence Journal and its wonderful late sports editor, Art Martone. I still cared a good deal about politics, but I felt I could afford to ignore it now and then. After September 11, I was forcibly reminded, as Leon Trotsky may or may not have said, that you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you. I was still interested in baseball, and it remained a major focus of my blogging for the next nine years, but I could no longer avoid the pull of politics and war. I opened my own blog to start writing about them in 2002, then joined the “warblog” The Command Post by 2003 and the grassroots conservative blog RedState not long after it opened in 2004. Those choices would lead me down the path to doing this for a living. That was a road I wasn’t thinking about on that sunny morning in 2001.