I had a really weird experience tonight. Seth Dillingham and I were e-mailing back and forth about some issues with my dedicated server. I looked at my calendar and proposed going ahead with something on 10/11.
Just seeing 10/11 like that sent chills through my spine. As Seth put it in his reply to my e-mail, “I’d be happy to skip it and go straight to the 12th.”
I imagine there will be a lot of similar emotions on the one month anniversary of the terrorist attack, and probably a lot of fears of possible new attacks. The thing I find weird about the whole thing now is that life goes on.
On the one hand, of course, it’s very gratifying to see that terrorists can’t quite bring down civilization that easily. On the other hand, it’s kind of eerie to think that 6,000 people can just disappear off the face of the Earth, and yet people return, eventually, to what they were doing before.
Of course my life has returned to normal in large measure because the only person I knew who was actually in the World Trade Center at the time managed to escape safely. There are obviously many people whose lives won’t return to normal for a very long time.