New York City police officers stand watch over a starkly different skyline, Dec. 5.
[Photo: Cherie Diez,Times staff]
By Tom Drury
© St. Petersburg Times published December 30, 2001
Rarely has the calendar proven such an unreliable ally in our perception of time.
Everything that came before the 11th of September recedes in memory, as if it happened years ago, in a different time and place.
2001 will be remembered for a single day, a Tuesday morning, when four commandeered jetliners glided out of a clear blue sky and into the beginning of a war.
The lives taken without mercy or warning, the unprecedented ruin visited on two communities at the heart of the American enterprise, could not help but overshadow what came before and after.
The attacks deepened an economic downturn, made a trusted president out of an uncertain figure with no clear mandate, and stirred both the resolve and mortal fears of a nation.
Gas masks, flags, and books on the Taliban stole the commercial limelight from big vehicles and small electronic gadgets. Five died of anthrax poisoning, likely from a domestic source. And an old debate -- civil liberties in wartime democracy -- returned to life with talk of military tribunals and a thousand people held in detention.
In this atmosphere, travel and diversion did not seem like such important ideas anymore. People stopped going places, Florida's tourist economy took the hit, and state lawmakers were left grasping at budget cuts.
Now, in the midst of a subdued holiday season, as the country turns from the news of war and toward the comforts of friends and family, there may be time to ask: What else did happen this year? And did it matter?
Well, quite a bit happened, and it mattered. It's true that some of it seems a little overblown in retrospect. Remember the Summer of the Shark, when a handful of deadly attacks raised concerns of an interspecies vendetta?
Other dangers, natural and manmade, proved altogether real. A January earthquake killed tens of thousands in western India. Fourteen immigrants from Mexico died in the scorching heat of the Arizona desert in May. Violence marred the peace process in Northern Ireland and derailed it in the Middle East.
Thousands lamented the death of NASCAR's "last cowboy," Dale Earnhardt, whose good fortune ran out on the final lap of the Daytona 500 in February. Tampa suffered the loss of Lois Marrero, a tough, good-hearted cop, gunned down in July by a bank robber.
Mourners came out with American flags, as they would again, months later.
Similarly, Sept. 11 changed politics so abruptly that it would be easy to overlook the revolutions that had already been in the works. Florida rebuilt its election system following the fiasco of November (and December) 2000, throwing out the punch cards and vowing never to decide an election so absurdly again.
And in Washington, a little-known Vermont lawmaker named James Jeffords changed his affiliation from Republican to independent in May, thus singlehandedly shifting control of the Senate to the Democrats.
As the year ends, the story that consumed it continues. The battle for Afghanistan shows signs of being over, but the administration has promised a war that will keep on. And heightened security measures -- even shoes are suspect in airports these days -- have not ended worries of more attacks.
We may recall the words of President Bush at his inauguration on a cold and gloomy January day, almost a year ago though it seems like ten: "Our national courage has been clear in times of depression and war, when defending common dangers defined our common good." |
