Three years later...

...ok, plus a day. Yesterday was hell on Earth for me at work, so I didn't get a chance to blog this on the day that it was appropriate.

Matthew Yglesias has written a very elegant, heartfelt piece on what 9/11 was like and how we may have largely missed the boat in the months and years to follow. Definitely worth the read--and make sure you read the whole thing.

I can hardly believe it's been 3 years. Anna wasn't even born then, so it truly was a completely different lifetime for me. I'll still never forget the first heart-stopping images I saw on the TV after Heidi called me telling me that I had to turn on the TV because a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. I thought surely it was a little twin engine plane, but when I turned on the TV and saw the billowing smoke coming out of the building, I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I can't remember if I turned it on before or after the second plane hit, but I didn't have the TV on for long before they were saying it was a terrorist attack.

It was weird to go to work that day--surfing news sites (that you could get to) whenever you had a free minute, watching the TV down at the nurses' station. It was so surreal. Gas lines in small town Iowa because there were reports that gas was going to be 7 dollars a gallon. That was when it hit home for me. Something that occurred thousands of miles away could penetrate small town America was a wake-up call for me. I mean, it's not like I was nonchalant and blase about the whole thing before that, but that's the first time I remember really being scared. Because lets face it, they weren't going to fly a plane into city hall or my house in the middle of Iowa. But that scared me.

I always feel like the Pentagon gets the short end of the stick because it's the less "sexy" of the attacks. People tend to forget that a lot of people lost their lives at the Pentagon too. And many more could have potentially lost their lives had the fourth plane not crashed in Pennsylvania. It's scary to think about.

Read it. It's good stuff.