A month later, 'normal' is relative

A month later, 'normal' is relative

A month later, you can fly out of Reagan Washington National Airport, pedal a bicycle over the Golden Gate Bridge, and ride to the top of the Empire State Building. A month later, you can't pack a corkscrew in your carry-on bag, visit the Sears Tower Skydeck, or take the Lincoln Tunnel into Manhattan in the morning without someone else in the car. A month later, deep in the wreckage of the world's greatest office complex, fire still burns — fate's memorial flame for the many souls whose remains still have not been found. A month later, September 11 seems like yesterday and September 10 feels like yesteryear.

The terrorist jetliner crashes that destroyed the World Trade Center, ripped open the Pentagon and dug a 50-foot crater in western Pennsylvania also warped time itself, dividing life as sharply into Before and After as Fort Sumter or Pearl Harbor or the Kennedy assassination.

In the month before 9/11, the talk of the breakfast table was Barry Bonds' home runs and Michael Jordan's comeback, Chandra Levy's whereabouts and shark attacks.

In the month after 9/11, the talk is of crop dusters and mass murder, and whether smallpox will make a comeback. People who paid top dollar for a view of the Manhattan skyline can't bear to look out the window.

A month ago, the cover of New York magazine reported, "You CAN Afford to Live Here — Six Great, Up-and-Coming Neighborhoods that Won't Break Your Budget." A month later, the same magazine asks, "Should We Stay or Should We Go?"

Back on our feet                       By Susan Walsh, AP    A month after the Pentagon was torn open by a jetliner, the FBI has turned the site over to the military for a rebuilding project.

A month after the worst day in its history, America is slowly recovering its equilibrium.

The country is worried and determined, sad and optimistic, resigned to the future and nostalgic for an era that ended 30 days ago this morning at 8:48 a.m.

The country is almost everything, in fact, except back to normal.

Yet that is what everyone wants, from the president down. "Normalcy," a word coined in 1920 by Warren Harding to put a gloss on a retreat from global responsibility after World War I, has crossed over from bad English to American obsession.

And now, with the bombing of Afghanistan, normalcy is more elusive than ever. "We're waiting for the other foot to drop," says Bill Bunton, 45, of Mount Vernon, N.Y.

Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta suggests a more modest goal; he calls it the "new normalcy."

The new normalcy is a National Guardsman in camouflage fatigues with an M-16 standing next to the Delta counter. It is an airline pilot, locked in a cockpit with a reinforced door, coming on the intercom to tell passengers, in so many words, to keep an eye on each other. It is a Washington subway station manager with a yellow gas mask.

The new normalcy is the Coast Guard inspecting every ship coming into New York Harbor and jet fighters patrolling the skies. It is Osama bin Laden interrupting our regularly scheduled programs to tell us we "will never taste security."

Our leaders, sounding a bit like parents hectoring couch-bound children on a sunny day, want us out of the house. They offer free passage over bridges and through tunnels (in Maryland last weekend) and free rides on the subway (Washington, D.C., this weekend).

Shopping has become a patriotic act, as has dining out. George W. Bush, in a novel exercise of presidential power, has even told Americans to go to Disney World.

We're not spending enough to lift the sagging economy, but we are stocking up on flags, guns, candles and gas masks. The latter have gone, in 4 weeks, from novelty items most popular at Halloween to essential accessories for the secure homeland household. A store in Cherry Hill, N.J., quickly sold out of its Israeli-made models, even though the instructions were in Hebrew.

Things are grim on Oct. 11, 2001, but perhaps not as grim as on Jan. 7, 1942. This time, there's no draft, no rationing, no price controls, no air-raid drills. No one is planting victory gardens or hanging blackout curtains. For all the fears of homeland terrorism, the nation's immediate future is not likely to hold any pitched battles like the Battle of the Bulge (almost 20,000 U.S. dead).

The nation's mood depends on where you go and when. Reports from USA TODAY correspondents:

• In Boston, people are still looking up. On days when the wind blows out of the west, Logan International Airport's departure path parallels the city skyline. Before Sept. 11, the sight was an advertisement for modern mankind: big, powerful jets framed for a second between the gleaming Hancock and Prudential towers. Now, pedestrians in Copley Square stop and follow the airliners apprehensively until they have ascended and moved out of harm's way.

• In Seattle, people are looking forward — to things like the Mariners' playoff games and the Nov. 6 mayoral election. And to a better world. On Sunday, as U.S. warplanes bombed Afghanistan, tennis stars joined Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos at a celebrity pro-am tennis match that raised $1.4 million for breast cancer research. Asked about the propriety of tennis at such a time, Martina Navratilova replied that breast cancer kills as surely as a bomb: "We are not here to play games, we are here to raise money for a very important cause. What are we supposed to do? Stay home? We can't go to Afghanistan. Life goes on."

• In Los Angeles, people are looking around. Concrete barriers have been bulldozed into place to block off downtown streets around City Hall and other government buildings. A few miles west in Century City, guards check beneath cars entering the garage of the 44-story Century Plaza Towers. Even Los Angeles drivers seem more careful; what would happen if you cut off a terrorist?

• In Denver, people are hooking up. The shock of Sept. 11 seems to have translated into a new civility. Mountain bikers are more courteous to hikers, and neighbors seem more likely to stop, linger and chat. But there's one big disappointment: The city has canceled its annual New Year's Eve celebration, saying it simply couldn't provide sufficient security for such a large gathering.

The prime terrorist targets — airports, skyscrapers, monuments, government buildings — are in metro areas. But the countryside has some jitters, too.

A lot of places are close to potential terrorist targets. The scenic Hudson River community of West Point, N.Y., has the U.S. Military Academy; White Hall, Ark., is home to the Pine Bluff Arsenal and its chemical weapons stockpile; Knob Noster, Mo., is next to Whiteman Air Force Base, home of B-2 stealth bombers. If terrorists were to strike the base, "I'd be the first to disappear," says Saturn Elod, a woman who lives next door. "But you have to go sometime."

Meanwhile, at the site of the crashes, investigation has largely given way to repair and recovery. Workers have hauled more than 231,000 tons of debris from the Trade Center and another 10,000 tons from the Pentagon, and have filled the hole in Shanksville, Pa., created by the crash of United Flight 93.

A fire deep in the Trade Center's seven-story basement may burn for months, feeding on tons of pulverized debris. New York Fire Commissioner Thomas Von Essen says crews can't put the fire out until they can reach it, adding, "It's almost like going down into hell."

The cleanup of the 1.2 million tons of debris is expected to take the better part of a year.

At the Pentagon, the FBI has turned the site over to the military for a repair project expected to cost $520 million and take several years.

Life goes on

A month after the attacks, Americans are ambivalent about the terrorist threat. Most seem ready to give up some financial privacy, ease of travel and personal autonomy if the government can crack the terrorists' financial network, keep their kamikaze pilots out of airliners and protect potential targets, including the nation's 600,000 bridges and 50 office towers taller than 750 feet.

On the other hand, only 27% of those surveyed in a CNN/USA TODAY/Gallup Poll say they'd change any aspect of their personal life to reduce the chance of being a victim of terrorist attack.

 
By Robert Hanashiro, USA TODAY
At a candlelight vigil Sept. 15 in Bonita, Calif., attendees pay tribute to the hundreds of firefighters who died at the Trade Center.
 

A nation accustomed to cloudless skies is finding silver linings, such as a piece of Trade Center wreckage shaped like a cross, and the heroic rebellion of passengers aboard Flight 93. New York, which had readied 30,000 body bags, could wind up with fewer than 5,000 dead.

And so life goes on.

In the past month, Miss America has been crowned in Atlantic City and Hugh Hefner has been roasted at the Friars Club in New York. Jordan came back, Bonds shattered the home run record, and Cal Ripken played his last game.

The Empire State Building observation deck has reopened, and a line stretched around the block last weekend. Retail sales have been off, but mall attendance, which dropped by two-thirds Sept. 11, bounced back to normal the next day.

Leno and Letterman are telling jokes again, although the commander in chief has yet to feel their old sting. They have a new target. Bin Laden, Jay Leno says, is "the richest man in Afghanistan — he has a three-donkey garage."

The bearded rebel is America's new villain — "WANTED: DEAD or alive," according to a sign on Ferry Street in Newark.

New York, site of the worst attack, epitomizes the mixed picture. In Midtown, the growing number of tourists are snapping up World Trade Center placemats at $3 and bin Laden "Wanted" T-shirts for $10. "I don't want this to sound the wrong way, but it's almost like nothing ever happened," said Jarred Stern, a lawyer enjoying his lunch break in front of the Seagram Building.

Downtown, it's another story. About 10,000 phone lines are still out, as many as one in five lawyers have been displaced, and the courts are hopelessly backed up. The Fulton Fish Market, a fixture on the Lower East Side for more than a century, has moved to the Bronx.

New York City is on the edge of what Cooper Union political scientist Fred Siegel calls "an economic abyss." According to one study, in the past month the city has lost about 108,500 jobs — more than the workforce of greater Burlington, Vt., and 2.4% of New York City's total.

In 75 minutes, Lower Manhattan — the nation's second-largest business district — lost 26 million of its 108 million square feet of office space. About 12.5 million square feet was destroyed (more than all the office space in downtown Miami), and 13.3 million is currently unusable (roughly as much as Atlanta's).

But the economic loss is less painful than the human one.

Only about 10% of the Trade Center victims have been identified, and a third of the Pentagon victims are unaccounted for. Almost 1,400 applications for expedited death certificates have been filed by relatives of Trade Center victims whose remains have not been found.

Even without bodies to bury, New York is a city of constant mourning.

Some people do virtually nothing but go to funerals, two or three each day. Last Saturday, there were 23 services for firefighters; the department's honor unit has split into six groups.

Because so few bodies have been recovered from the wreckage, the city will give relatives urns with dust from the site. Meanwhile, funerals and memorial services proceed with photos or mementos. One fireman's wake featured a display with his photo and his hockey skates.

Hope for the future

Yet even amid the desolation, there are signs of new life. The New York Life insurance company has approved a $68 million mortgage for a new apartment tower in Battery Park City, next to where the World Trade Center stood. Larry Silverstein, who holds the lease on the Trade Center site, has hired architects to work on a plan to rebuild.

And in northern New Jersey, the young widow of Flight 93 hero Jeremy Glick got through her first suppertime alone, without friends or relatives or journalists.

Lyzbeth Glick told a newspaper that as she was compiling a scrapbook for her 3-month-old daughter, "I thought, 'How sad that Emerson will never know her dad. How sad that she'll only know a sad mom.' "

But then something inside her clicked, maybe the same thing that made her husband do what he did.

"I sat there and thought, 'No,' " she recalled. " 'These things aren't going to happen.' "

Since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, America has changed in ways small and large. Here's a look at some of those changes:

Average number of bomb scares per day in New York City:
• Before: 6
• Days after: 100
• One month later: 30

Average number of daily trips New Jersey limo driver Jim Fabrizio made to Newark International Airport:
• Before: 6
• After: 3

Monthly revenue for nation's limousines on airport rides:
• Before: $666 million
• After: $333 million

Daily ridership on N.Y. Waterway Ferry:
• Before: 34,000
• After: 50,000

Average daily revenue of the Afghan Grill in Edison, N.J.:
• Before: $1,300
• After: $100

Jobs lost in New York City because of the terrorist attacks:
• Total: 108,507, or 2.4%
Among them:
• Restaurants: 11,879
• Broadway: 7,766
• Securities: 12,180
• Retail trade: 12,187

What the Red Cross has done so far at the World Trade Center and Pentagon:
• Raised $369 million for victims' relief (as of 6 p.m. Oct. 8)
• Provided $14 million to 914 families
• Counseled 91,999 people for grief and mental health
• Served 6,045,322 meals or snacks
• Employed 35,246 disaster workers, including 33,541 volunteers

Top books in the Amazon.com 100:
• Before (Sept 4-10): Jack: Straight from the Gut, Jack Welch
Black House, Stephen King and Peter Straub
The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen
• After (Sept. 11-16):
Twin Towers: The Life of New York City's World Trade Center, Angus Kress Gillespie
Nostradamus: The Complete Prophecies, John Hogue
Germs: America's Secret War Against Biological Weapons, Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg and William J. Broad
• Now (as of Oct. 8):
Taliban, Ahmed Rashid
The Corrections
Jack: Straight from the Gut

Source: USA TODAY research by Lori Joseph and Rick Hampson

Contributing: Martha T. Moore in New York; Fred Bayles in Boston; Patrick McMahon in Seattle; Martin Kasindorf in Los Angeles; Tom Kenworthy and Patrick O'Driscoll in Denver

http://www.usatoday.com/news/sept11/2001/10/11/month-later.htm