9/11 attacks still shaping life in America

How do we add up the ways in which the 9/11 attacks on lower Manhattan and the Pentagon go on shaping and coloring the public life of the region and the nation?

We remember those who died. We remain at war in Afghanistan. Some of us still argue the borders between security and liberty, between surveillance and spying.

We warily digest news of thwarted plots. Some who worked at Ground Zero, still among us, suffer with lingering illnesses. And 9/11 still gets deployed, here and there, as verbal ammunition in electoral debates.

By now, many things that seem to spring from that day and its aftermath are mere habit.

You remove your shoes to board a plane. You hear disembodied voices on the train tell you to "say something" if you "see something." Concrete barriers prevent you from driving up to official buildings. You empty your pockets to walk through metal detectors to go inside.

People knew instantly the political impact would be profound. Late in the afternoon of 9/11, after witnessing the destruction, I walked north from North Moore Street alongside a French photographer I'd met in search of a working subway line.

"So what will it be," he said. "Internment camps . . . or Western passivity?"

Farther uptown, I ran into Peter Johnson Jr., a lawyer -- who days later gave a eulogy for his friend Father Mychal Judge, the city Fire Department chaplain who died in the Twin Towers, a service attended by firefighters covered in Ground Zero dust.

Johnson said on the phone Tuesday: "I think in New York we have a greater understanding of other parts and viewpoints of the world. At the same time we have a greater sense of vulnerability, and then we have a greater appreciation for American exceptionalism.

"That understanding, combined with that vulnerability, has created a new nationalism that we may not have had before. It's a combination of the sense of our weakness, also, the sense of our superiority."

One day that season, after the mayoral race resumed, Democratic primary candidate Fernando Ferrer rode in a private car from Manhattan to a campaign stop. He gazed out at soldiers in fatigues as they inspected vehicles lined up to enter the Queens Midtown Tunnel. Ferrer said simply: "We've never seen this -- not in this country."

At that moment the mayor was Rudy Giuliani -- who spoke Tuesday before the National Press Club. He called 9/11 "part of our present reality."

"The people who attacked us under that banner of distorted Islam," Giuliani said, "still want to attack us under the banner of distorted Islam."

In that vein, House Homeland Security chairman Peter King (R-Seaford) was back in the news last week, saying he'll hold further hearings on radicalization in Muslim communities in the United States.

Others currently in the limelight prefer to evoke a dawn that followed the dark.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose first term began Jan. 1, 2002, Tuesday hailed a vibrancy that returned to downtown following the destruction. He told an audience of civic and business leaders: "I believe the rebirth and revitalization of lower Manhattan will be remembered as one of the greatest comeback stories in American history."

As mayor during the period, he would hope that's true. But who can really say how any event will be collectively interpreted in another 10 years? Those who remember the disastrous day from close up may feel it still belongs to current events -- not to history just yet.