Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid

Wednesday’s steam pipe explosion in Manhattan brought me right back to 9/11. The soot-covered pedestrians rushing away from the billowing smoke were a close enough replay of the twin towers’ collapse which crushed my husband and sent his ashes sailing across the Hudson to New Jersey. Unfortunately, such associations are a natural consequence of having experienced the event; maybe that’s why so many in and around New York assumed it was a terrorist attack. In case people didn’t make the connection, the media was ready to make it, as Clyde Haberman noted in his NY Times Metro column this morning. His point seemed to be that we are encouraged to fear the worst and that certainly seemed to be a theme this week Politicians of all stripes, in the wake of the latest National Intelligence Estimate, issued statements to remind us we are under threat. Of course there are other things frightening us these days – tainted products from China, for example – but the drama associated with the attacks of 2001 retains the power to uniquely terrify us. And that seems to play directly into the hands of those who would disrupt our peace of mind. To be honest, the loss of unity and the unwillingness to compromise and find common ground amongst ourselves is, to my way of thinking, our biggest post-9/11 failure; that scares me more than any act of nature or man.