Reflecting on September 11, 2001

So how are you doing? I mean in terms of what happened to us on September 11th?

I live so far away from the East Coast that it is difficult for me to grasp the breadth and depth of the trials and tribulations in New York City, Washington, Pennsylvania, and in all the affected families here and in nearly eighty countries around the world.

All of it is very hard to comprehend, and God knows, many of us have tried.

So we go to our offices, look at the mail, answer the calls, write the letters, but I think many of us are in the same pickle I find myself in – we’re ignoring the complex projects which are ticking in the pile of papers on our desk.

Those tasks don’t seem very important just now, no matter what anyone says. We are trying to infuse the future with meaning and not fear. We are trying to return to normal, as the President and Mayor Giuliani would have us do. But there is no normal any more.

Like the papers which flew down from of those collapsing buildings, the images on the television which we have seen hundreds of times flutter through the shards of our normalcy.

And we know that what we saw on television bears no relationship to the horrific impact of the thing itself. Television allows us to disconnect from what we see on it, helped certainly by repetition of the images, but perhaps we are lucky to be protected in that way.

So how to understand all this, how to give it an expression which allows one to grasp the parameters of what happened to our country.

Think of it this way: If every radio and television network commemorated a victim each day until all had been remembered, the last name on the list would be commemorated sometime late in the year 2018.

Something over seventeen and a quarter years, in other words.

And if that doesn’t give you a sense of scale and make you mad as hell, then, friend, you just haven’t been paying attention.

Carry on, not in spite of those who did this, but because they did. There really is no choice.

Nick Nash