Posted 9:34 AM by Gene

Five years ago today: We are not being searched in the subways. We are unalarmed by the sight of valises left on streetcorners. We are not asked to remove our shoes at airport security gates.

Our young men and women are not being blown up daily by roadside bombs in a land far away.

And 2,749 people who work at the World Trade Center or plan to be on airplanes in the morning go safely to their beds, for the last time.

Yes, what happened the day after will stick with us the rest of our lives, but as cataclysmic as it was we must move on. Mort Zuck vaguely recognizes this with his tough talk of "Islamofacism", but this almost automatic thought (we'd say almost an afterthought) cannot fight the covert notion 9/11 is turning into (as I said before) our equivalent of Princess Di's death, with flowers and ribbons and puppy dogs. Perhaps this thinking (so well expressed by BIGMEDIA these last few days, and to be expressed for yet one day still) that we must WALLOW in 9/11 is why we can't get Ground Zero fixed, why our national politics are in such a total funk, why the Gulf Coast is in the same rancid squalor as a year ago. Neither does it help that our BIGMEDIA STATE is based largely in New York, away from the notion what happened that day five years ago may not be quite so morbid for the rest of us.

Nearly sixty-five years ago, 2,388 Americans died, and 1,178 were wounded, at Pearl Harbor, including 83 civilians. The 2,388 went safely to their beds and bunks for the last time on December 6, not imagining a Japanese air assault. They left behind spouses, families and sweethearts too. The day after, FDR had the Congress declare war. We won the war. We enjoyed a huge prosperity. Where is our guts? Where is our common sense? Where is our hope? Buried in the 9/11 rubble?