Brooklyn Bridge, New York
New York Lights
New York City, 2 months after
Liberty Statue and New York Lights
An anniversary can be sweet or solemn, but either way, it is only the echo, not the cry.

From this distance, we can hear whatever we are listening for.  We can argue that September 11 changed everything or nothing.

The country is more united, and less, more fearful and more secure, more serious and more devoted to American Idol.
It is like looking at your child's baby pictures.  You know exactly who it is: every feature is both different and the same,
despite new expressions, and furrows and knowledge.  Holding two contradictory ideas in your head was supposed to be a sign on first-rate intelligence.  Now it just fells like a vital sign.  To say we have changed fells like rewarding the enemy, but to deny it risks losing the knowledge for which we paid a terrible price--knowledge about who we become under pressure, in public and private.  People talked about living on a higher plane, with an intensity of fear and faith and gratitude, when it was easy to salute and hard to sleep and nothing was bland or phony or cheap.  But we could not live there forever; it was like the day you graduate from high school or your first child is born or your father dies--days of power and insight that grab you for a moment and, when they let you go, leave marks on your skin.  What marks can we see now?  President Bush says great good may come from the evil that struck, but you need a long lens to bring that hope into focus.  We resist the idea that we have changed because so much of the change of the past year feels like damage.  Lives have been lost or broken.  Whole sectors of the economy are in intensive care.  We talk about the need to balance freedom and security, but both have shriveled in the heat of the threat.  There seemed to be a spirit of infectious virtue everywhere we turned a year ago; we have since looked from the pulpit to the boardroom to the baseball diamond and wondered if there was an honest man anywhere in sight.

So, having hardened the soft targets and stored some water and a flashlight, we try to move on as though nothing fundamental has been lost, head down the road in our gas-guzzling cars and not mind if there's a checkpoint along the way.  The Fourth of July fireworks in Omaha, Nebraska, this summer culminated first in a proud, fiery, red-white-and blue U.S.A., then in rockets that formed smiley faces, then peace symbols.  Which mood best fits the
moment?  Berkeley, California, the antiwar town, is busy promulgating laws that would ban coffee that's not environmentally friendly.  The first-place TV show for the year was Friends--whose Manhattan-based characters, notes Chicago Tribune TV critic Steve Johnson, "never seemed to realize the skyline had changed".

Applications are up for both the Marine Corps and the Peace Corps; does that reflect good
hearts or bad job prospects?  For a while last year, we All were One, stunned, numbed, crushed and infalmed.  But the road forked somewhere, dividing those most directly affected from everyone else.  It is one thing to choke up when we read the "Portraits of Grief" obituaries in the New York Times, another to wake up every morning knowing there's a pair of ski boots in your hall closet that will never be used again and decide whether this is the day you'll finally take off your wedding ring.  Many may have had a burst of spiritual fuel, but that's not the same as having your minister suggest that GOD must have quite a plan for your life or he wouldn't have saved it, as a pastor told
Genelle Guzman-McMillan, the last survivor pulled from the hellfire.  We all may want to be closer to our families, but consider Sergeant Randel Perez, who met his firstborn son on Christmas Eve by borrowing a commando's laptop and grabbing the satellite link from Afghanistan to visit the hospital website.  "I'm sorry I couldn't be there", he told the image on the screen softly, over and over.  It's one thing to calculate what we've lost; but then there's Victim Compensation Fund arbiter Ken Feinberg, advising a widower who wants to know whether he should fill out one claim form or two, since his wife was eight months pregnant.  Most kids had their shock and confusion, but unlike Hillary Strauch, they didn't have a teacher pull them aside in the hall and say, "You're my hero", for how she has handled having her father crushed on TV.
TIME has tracked 11 people, 11 lives, men and women and children who are trailblazers in a new century, a new world, and they had no choice in the matter.  A President elected in times of Peace and Prosperity finds he has to preside over War and Retrenchment.  A military designed to sweep a continent is hunting shadows in caves.  A progressive Pakistani girl sees her classmates reach for a burqa and wonders about progress and peace.  We may dread the anniversary beacuse we don't want to go back there, but these people have never really left.

September 11 might as well have been yesterday.  So what do we owe them--and what can we learn from them?
(Source: TIME Magazine)
9/11
One Year Later