You know my politics, and my reactions to 9/11 and whatnot. Those on the other side of the divide rarely pass on the opportunity to make hay out of it, the fear, the sense of mission, danger, the role of the righteous victim. It's not unusual to see people justify all sorts of crackpot politics and authoritarian excess by bleating about how that day "changed everything."

It did, in a lot of ways, but for some reason only the Right has the right to talk about how they were affected. That's crap. It's on all of us. Like the other day taking the F train up over Smith and 9th, I looked into Manhattan and there was a thick low cloud obscuring the Empire State building, looked like the billowing smoke of yesteryear. So of course I wondered if something terrible had happened, what shape the next wave of awful would take.

90 seconds later the wind moved the clouds along and the moment passed, but that's the reality we all live in. Even those of us without paranoid authoritarian fantasies.