In a post-9/11 United States, we find ourselves at war on three fronts, and government more secretive and invasive than it has been in years, Leonard Pitts Jr. writes in a column for McClatchy Newspapers.
Suddenly, it has been 10 years.
That's an amazing realization when you remember how it was back then. Calendars still counted off days; our eyes told us this. Clocks still ticked off seconds; intellectually, we knew. But time — I would have sworn this in a court of law — did not move.
I remember, in those awful days of aftermath, asking my colleague, Dave Barry, then the Miami Herald's humor columnist, if he thought he would ever write jokes again. "For the last week," he told me, "I haven't even tried to write anything funny, and for a while I thought maybe I never would, or should."
He had it; we all had it — that sense of being stuck, unable to find your way back to the life you had lived before. I wrote 10 columns in a row about the horror I had seen, the planes crashing, the lives lost, the buildings melting, the people covered in dust. Finally, I had to force myself to write a column about something else, had to force myself to care about something that was not terror. That lasted one column. Then I went right back to what was now the norm. I was all terror, all the time.
Read Leonard Pitts' entire column at the Centre Daily Times.