First off, since we all remember where we were when we heard the news, I woke up to some combination of Howard Stern and a beeping alarm clock, and I remember thinking in my waking daze that Howard must be doing a bit on something with all the commotion. I don't remember what time it was, but I think I tuned in to the news and immediately became embroiled in the moment-by-moment updates coming from every news outlet.

Back in 1995, one of my friends from college, Thuc, and I went to New York for the winter holidays and did the whole tourist thing. The Statue of Liberty was closed thanks the Federal Government being shut down with budget wrangling, so we were stuck at Battery Park and decided to head to the roof of the WTC for the view. We ended up spending the entire day up there, grabbing something to eat and watching the view go from daytime to nighttime. The temperature on the roof was something like 50 degrees below zero with windchill, making it nearly impossible to handle a camera with bare hands. We did get some nice pictures and had a great day just looking out onto the world from up there.

I called Thuc early on and we flipped through our photos from that trip, in utter disbelief. It's unfortunate that almost all of the attention is focused on the WTC fatalities when people lost their lives in exactly the same way at the Pentagon and in Pennsilvania, but that's the way we are I guess.

So here we are today. Every time we talk about anything there's the pre-9/11 and post-9/11 viewpoints, and the "everything changed after 9/11" mantra seems-- to me-- to be a really easy way out. If we are so strong as a country, so able to pull together in times of trouble such as these, it seems a shame that the feeling of national unity and the can-do American Spirit has continued to decay over the three years. Okay, I'm a software engineer, so some of that view comes from the old post-boom-days viewpoint.

Anyway, three years have ticked away, let's hope that we can eventually turn things around. Let's see, from the attack in 1941 to the economic boom of 1995 or so... that isn't too long.