Five years later...

Today is kind of a depressing day. If you watch the news, all you’re going to hear about is the anniversary of September 11th and the funeral for Trooper Joseph Longobardo.

There seems to be an enormous amount of attention paid to the anniversary of the attacks this year. Over the weekend, every time I flipped through the channels I would stumble across a special of some sort about the attacks—and I kept on flipping. Not because I didn’t care, but because it was just too depressing.

That got me thinking about our fascination with numbers. Is the fifth anniversary any more important or significant than the fourth was or the sixth will be? Yet there is something about the numbers divisible by 5 that makes them seem extra special. Why is that?

I had the Today show on this morning and I heard Matt Lauer remark about how there would be a moment of silence at Ground Zero at 8:46 a.m., when the first plane hit. He said he was sure there would be a similar moment of silence in every town and city in the country.

But at about that time, I was getting ready to leave for work. I kissed my wife goodbye. I noted the painters hard at work on my neighbor’s house. On the radio Mike & Mike were recapping Sunday s football games. People were walking up and down the street and in and out of the nearby grocery store. Life was moving on.

And maybe that’s the greatest tribute on 9/11. Americans are still going about their daily lives in the face of a world threatened by terrorism.