I awoke this morning hoping that everything that I had seen and heard yesterday was a dream. As I listened to Howard Stern on the radio, the realization struck me that what took place was real. The shock, sadness and anger over this horrible attack on our country finally hit me. I was not incapacitated or wracked with tears, but for just a minute I stared out the window to the east where I could still see smoke from the city that sits smoldering just a few miles away and I cried.

I cried because our world had suddenly and forever changed. Our sense of safety and security in our own homes and in our own country has been brutally stolen. We are no longer exempt from acts of terrorism on our own soil.

There’s not much I can say about what happened, but I ran across this piece on a bulletin board on Ain’t It Cool News that echoes my sentiment.

[i]”When I saw the second plane hit the tower, I still couldn’t accept what I knew deep down to be true. So blinded and secure in my own world that I chose to enter the city regardless. Church bells ringing and sirens blaring as I came above ground. All I can say is that the world was not irreparably changed in a moment or a flash, the hand of God shuffling the deck for another game of chance where the house always wins with a flick of the wrist and a wink of an omniscient eye. It took about an hour and forty minutes before I realized that some day I would tell my children about the two towers that once stood over Manhattan, and how when they fell, they took with them the blanket of security that had protected me my for entire life. The gaping hole in the skyline, missing front teeth on a beautiful face that I had known all my life. In the span of one hundred minutes I caught my first glimpse of an understanding as to what it was to live in a nation under attack, a nation at war. This is a day that I hoped and prayed I’d never see. Not just the list of tragic events rolling off the media conveyor belt , but the implications and ramifications that have yet to fully play themselves out, and the understanding of what it’s like to live in a world where the worst is possible. There will be sky again, crystal clear and baby blue – but now it hides, obscured by smoke and debris. Brown clouds of uncertainty descend upon us all, and my worst fear is that we’ve just been introduced to the reality that shaped our parents and their parents, and their parents before them. It is not the end of the world, only a pause, but in it we must take the time to stifle tears and clear our heads. Days of infamy have marked our history, this will certainly be remembered as one of them.”[/i]