We must remain diligent 10 years after 9/11

[Geee]

Washington Examiner:

Random events are usually more indicative of the passage of time than any formal anniversaries, and for me, Sept. 11 is no different.

Last month, I was in an elevator and it started to shake wildly. At first, I assumed it was just on the fritz. When I got off and people started running toward the stairs and out of the building, I assumed there was a fire. When I saw none, I tossed around several other possibilities before finding out it was a rare Washington, D.C., earthquake.

Hours later, it struck me that there was one possibility I had never even considered. This is when I realized how much had changed in the 10 years since the worst attack on American soil.

I was in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001, when two hijacked planes slammed into the World Trade Center. Living and working in Times Square in the months and years that followed, the biggest change was the assumption that any out-of-the-ordinary occurrence, even those that really weren't even that abnormal for a big city, must be a terrorist attack.

When the first plane hit the World Trade Center, I hadn't immediately thought it was act of terrorism. It took the second plane hitting. Yet suddenly, loud noises, blown transformers, popped manhole covers, and unexpected fireworks displays seemed like terrorism until proven otherwise.

It's a part of human nature that the further removed we are from a traumatic event, the less threatened we feel. And there's no doubt that, as the memories of the Sept. 11 attacks recede, so does the fear of terrorism. Last month, just 3 percent of Americans polled by CNN identified terrorism as the most important issue facing the country today.

In one sense, this is a good thing. Among the most effective responses to terrorism is to make sure it has as little effect on people's day-to-day lives as possible and that people do not live in fear.

At the same time, there is also a danger, as time goes by without a major terrorist incident, that people will begin to assume that we're out of the woods, and that no real threat remains. They'll think that perhaps the terrorists got lucky 10 years ago, and that 9/11 was an aberration.

Yet this would be a mistake. One of the reasons that the Sept. 11 plot succeeded was that it caught the nation completely off guard. Even though there hasn't been a major incident since, there still are Islamic terrorist groups conspiring to carry out attacks on America.