The latest 9/11

I thought I’d do a little 9/11 reflection.

For starters, I’m curious as to how many people actually realized that 9/11 was coming around. Granted, everything related to hurricane Katrina has monopolized the headlines for the last two weeks, so it’s somewhat understandable for 9/11 to get pushed onto page two.

“9/11? That’s sooo four years ago.”

I’ve got a little 9/11 story to share. On the one year anniversary I was finishing up my first internship at Microsoft. It was during my last week there, when I spent every-other night in my office because I no longer had my summer apartment (because Kutta and Andy had left the week before). If you’re wondering I spent the other half of the nights at my mom’s house. I would have spent all of the nights at my mom’s house except that it was nearly a 90-minute bus commute each way, and I only felt up to making one of those trips each day. Anyway, the night of 9/10/02 was spent in my office, and I remember this because remember staying up most of the night, working while waiting for that first, “We’ve been attacked again,” headline to flash up on CNN. Obviously that headline never came. What’s surprising to me now is how likely I thought the possibility was at the time. If I had to put a percentage figure on my mindset, I’d estimate I thought there was a 25%-50% chance we’d get attacked again. Now, we can argue about how well educated I was about the situation (or, more correctly, how uneducated I was), but the real point of the matter is that that was what I believed at the time, and I have a feeling that a large, large number of others felt the same way.

Now, fast-forward to the present day. Not even five years later 9/11 has passed with minimal fan-fare. Yeah, it’s mostly because Katrina is the latest disaster flavor of the week, but I’m not sure if that necessarily comforts me any more than the media focusing on the anniversary of 9/11. On one hand, I’m glad to see that America has cooled their jets about the threat of terrorism and, for the most part, gone back to their normal lives. Example: Apparently there was a threat on Los Angeles (where I live, of course) for 9/11 this year which I didn’t hear about until today (9/12). And it’s not like I’m particularly cut off from the media either. On top of being an internet news junkie, I constantly listen to talk radio (as any of my past roommates can attest to), so you would think that I would have heard about the threat. Granted, authorities are all but calling it bogus, but just a year ago even a fake threat would put at least the area threatened on orange alert (or whatever that ridiculous color-coded system is). Not this year. So, it’s nice that people have calmed down some.

On the other hand, I tend to think the reason people have calmed down is less because they’ve learned how to live with the threat of terrorism (i.e. “if there’s nothing I can do (or am willing to do) about it, I might as well put together some emergency kits and go on living like I did before) and more because they’ve begun to ignore it in favor of other hot-button issues. To me that just says that the people of the U.S. can be lead by whomever can best get at certain motivating emotions, and I’m not sure how much I like that…