Just an ordinary day...

Today is the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centers and the Pentagon (fondly known as 9/11). On 9/11/01, we as a country changed. Bad things could happen here.

Passing the buck and the blame game haven't stopped yet. Even after all the reports and the minute dissections by the various committees on the inaction of various agencies to recognize the threats, no one entity seems to be to blame. For nearly 3,000 people, their lives winked out, but their families remain behind, still devastated to this day.

For me personally, I knew no one there and no one immediately impacted by the attacks. For me, it was an ordinary day. I went to work—I remember that I was listening to a tape cassette that day rather than to the radio. Then someone at work flipped on the radio, and I sat transfixed, doing my work mechanically. I could have screwed up half of what I was working on for all I know. The news reports seemed unreal, as if in 2001, Orson Welles was narrating the "War of the Worlds" all over again, only with airplanes and skyscrapers instead of Martians and small country towns.

Even when my coworkers and I watched a few reports on an old black-and-white tv brought out from somewhere, I still couldn't believe what I was seeing. It was like a movie.

DH called me at work to ask me if I'd heard what happened. I wished I could have come home right then. I remember thinking that quite clearly. What if that attack was only the beginning? But I had to swallow my fear and somehow make it through the rest of the day. I sat at my desk, trying to work, while listening to the radio as the world changed.

That evening when I got home, DH & I continued to watch CNN, to try and make sense of it all. But there was no why. Even now I still don't comprehend the depth of the insane hatred that drives fanaticism. I doubt I ever will. Perhaps that is my luxury of being born into a white, middle-class, rural Midwestern family.

For all the victims of that day, their day also started out quite ordinary. But none of us—no one—would ever be the same.

I won't be watching the memorial tributes, or CNN's all-day retrospective, or the documentaries. The fear-mongering is with us every day. No clear progress has been made. The politicos talk about improvements in national security, but it seems that we have fewer freedoms than before. Big Brother is always looking over our shoulder. I suppose that's the price we must pay to feel even a bit of the carefree attitude we used to have before 9/11.

Bad things can happen here, even on an ordinary day.