September Tenth
As I fell asleep last night, I was thinking about the coming sixth anniversary of Nine-Eleven. This year it falls for the first time on a Tuesday. I started thinking about what life was like that day before. An unremarkable September 10th.
Personally, I was still settling in to a new job. I had just returned from summer vacation in Hilton Head, SC, and I was on a slow road to recovery from a bad bout with the flu.
The stories that were capturing our attention that summer seem further away in history than six years, perhaps because our world view was so fundamentally altered the next day. Some of the news back then:
Pop star Aaliyah had died in a plane crash
It had been the "Summer of the Shark"
Gary Condit and Chandra Levy were the primary fodder of the gossip rags
The big foreign policy story had been China's seizure of a USAF reconnaissance plane after it collided with a Chinese fighter aircraft while on a routine patrol
The Taliban were also in the news for forcing non-Muslims to wear badges reminiscent of Nazi Germany and for destroying the statues of Buddha at Bamiyan; though we were clueless about how perilously close we were to their evil
Looking back it somehow seems less than real when viewed through the lens of that terrible Tuesday morning. But there's a lesson to be learned, about the dangers of complacency, and about the importance of gratitude for those normal Monday mornings - no matter how boring they seem.
Personally, I was still settling in to a new job. I had just returned from summer vacation in Hilton Head, SC, and I was on a slow road to recovery from a bad bout with the flu.
The stories that were capturing our attention that summer seem further away in history than six years, perhaps because our world view was so fundamentally altered the next day. Some of the news back then:
Pop star Aaliyah had died in a plane crash
It had been the "Summer of the Shark"
Gary Condit and Chandra Levy were the primary fodder of the gossip rags
The big foreign policy story had been China's seizure of a USAF reconnaissance plane after it collided with a Chinese fighter aircraft while on a routine patrol
The Taliban were also in the news for forcing non-Muslims to wear badges reminiscent of Nazi Germany and for destroying the statues of Buddha at Bamiyan; though we were clueless about how perilously close we were to their evil
Looking back it somehow seems less than real when viewed through the lens of that terrible Tuesday morning. But there's a lesson to be learned, about the dangers of complacency, and about the importance of gratitude for those normal Monday mornings - no matter how boring they seem.
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