Give these clay feet wings to fly

What were we like before September 11?

Did we dread flying, did we fear terrorists? Did we idolize our firefighters, support our troops, question our government? Did we sing "God Bless America" at sporting events? Did we shop downtown?

On September 10, 2001, I went to see two cast members from The Real World speak at my college. I walked back across the campus to my dorm room. Then I went to bed. I remember this, of course, not because of what it was but because of what came after; because for days and weeks and maybe even a year the night of September 10 seemed to represent a gaping chasm, a sharp division between what we were and what we would become.

But five years is a long time; the jagged edge begins to blur, the abyss collapses with memory. It's one thing to remember a particular event -- being in the audience at Spingold, the warmth on campus after dark -- and another entirely to remember the everyday nature of our lives, our way of being. Did we always have our bags searched outside stadiums, show our ID at the airport? Were we suspicious of Islam? Did we avoid tall buildings? Did we love New York?

On September 12, 2001, we were still reeling, stunned into foretelling a vastly different future for ourselves, a new world populated by two kinds of people: foreign terrorists and a country full of New Yorkers. We thought we would never care about B-list celebrities again, that we would always wear the flag pin, that nothing would ever, ever be the same. Then we went to see Glitter at the movies; we watched Rudy Guiliani open Saturday Night Live. We embraced time as a way of eroding our grief. We couldn’t stay angry at a terrorist we couldn't find, so we blamed another instead. We spliced together images of the collapsing towers and set them to power ballads and dispensed them on the Internet as memorials, tributes, ways of moving on.

And common sense tells us that we did move on, we did return to normal. We're still rude to each other on the subway. We still wonder who the hell cares about Tom and Katie's baby and then watch her anyway on the evening news. Common sense points out that your life and my life, apart from a few minor inconveniences, isn't all that different from the way it was on September 10. Did we always value patriotism, desire revenge, report every suspicious package? Who remembers, really?

But maybe moving farther and farther away from September 11 isn't bringing us closer to "normality." Maybe there is no such thing as recovery and restoration. Recently, the more I think about September 11, the more I see us plunging deeper and deeper into that changed world we all feared on September 12. "In the weeks after 9/11, out of the pain and the fear there arose also grace and gratitude, eruptions of intense kindness that occurred everywhere, a sharp resolve to just be better, bigger, to shed the nonsense, rise to the occasion," writes Nancy Gibbs in Time. "We saw back then what we were capable of at our best, and now find ourselves just moving on, willing to listen to our leaders but not necessarily believe them, supporting the troops but disputing their mission, waiting, more resigned than resolved, for the next twist in the plot."

We had an opportunity -- a terrible one, yes, ignited by tragedy, but a way to transform ourselves, each other, our world, into something better. A way to be John Winthrop's city on a hill, E.B. White's plume saying the way is up. A visible symbol of aspiration and faith... Five years later, I'm afraid we may have squandered this opportunity. We've made Hollywood movies out of September 11. We've made T-shirts and hats out of September 11 that you can buy on the street in Little Italy for less than the price of a large Starbucks coffee. Worst of all, we've made a war out of September 11, but we haven't yet rebuilt a city.

Maybe there is no way to rebuild, just as there is no way to get back to September 10. Maybe the only thing to do is to start again.

"Do we now panic, or will we be brave? Once the dump trucks and bulldozers have cleared away the rubble and a thousand funeral Masses have been said, once the streets are swept clean of ash and glass and the stores and monuments and airports reopen, once we have begun to explain this to our children and to ourselves, what will we do?"

What will we do? asked Nancy Gibbs on September 14, 2001. What will we do? We're still answering this question, every day. In 30 or 40 or 50 years, when we tell our children about September 11, I suspect that the most important part of the story will be the transformation from what we were on September 10 to what we became after. Five years is a long time, but that part, at least, is still in our hands.