I sat in my office over the garage listening to Don Imus with my employee.  My oldest son, then 13, was home sick from school.

Imus made mention of a plane flying into a World Trade Center Tower.  He thought it was a small airplane at first.  

After a few minutes of more news dribs and drabs, I decided to head down and check on my son who was on the couch watching television and to flick the TV over to CNN to see if they had picked up on it.  I was curious as to the nature of the flames and the like.

I came down, explained the situation to my son, grabbed the clicker and flicked it to CNN.

Seconds later we watched the second plane fly into the second tower live on CNN.

I turned to my son and simply said, "This is no fucking accident.  We're under attack."

Forty-two at the time, I had never felt the fear of being attacked on our shores.  Never.  Sure, I watched Vietnam news clips as a kid.  Yes, I watched CNN as the Bush 1 rockets rained down on Baghdad, but I never felt the nation's shores were threatened.

It was a first, and likely a sentiment felt by a huge majority of the nation. 

We stayed glued to the television throughout most of the day.  The other hits to the Pentagon and the plane downed in a Pennsylvania field stoked our fears.  With planes having originated from Boston, I worried about knowing people killed.  With prep school and college friends working on Wall Street, I worried about knowing folks in the buildings.   With distant political connections from my presidential campaign involvement in 1980, I worried about knowing folks in DC.

I knew five in all.  

I also heard the next summer at a high school reunion the anguished recollections of a woman, married to her high school sweetheart I also know, during the hours she could not contact him at as this was happening, given his office was in one of the towers.  I can still remember the anguish in her eyes that June night on the steps by our cafeteria as she told her story.  I had to strain at times, as the music coming from the cafeteria invaded the moment as people went in and out of the door to grab beer from the keg, thereby raising and lowering the background noise.

I felt real fear for the nation after 9/11, and, frankly, I do to this day.  Worry we were not equipped as a nation to handle this.  There are things unique to our being in this country that run counter to what needs to be done to thwart attacks of this nature.  We value our freedom of movement, for example.  We have -- or, sadly, had --  an open door policy on immigration making these attacks easy.

 I say sadly, because the terrorists didn't obliterate the Statue of Liberty, our symbol of compassion we seem to have forgotten as we focus on the devastation of the World Trade Center, our symbol of our strong brand of Capitalism, however imperfect at times.  We have figuratively obliterated "Lady Liberty's" symbolism through our lack of compassion for those in need based on our national fears.

I did not feel personally in jeopardy, living high on a hill with 20+ mile vistas out the front windows of an 1800 antique farmhouse on 10 acres of land.  The population is not dense enough to be a target, save for an errant heroic act by passengers bringing down a plane in a supreme act of valor and personal sacrifice for the greater good.

And that house is not in a flight pattern, so it was little worry to me personally.  Forty five miles from Boston, toxic fumes from some catastrophe there would be easy to avoid.

A year or so later I heard of the fear of a college friend with two kids and a husband living in the DC metro area.  They have meeting points and keep cash in the home in the event it happens again.  I have not talked to her recently and know not if the urgency for such contingency planning has passed.  

So I felt great patriotic fear that day.  Concern for the nation.  It unified us, sadly, for far too brief a period.  We cannot seem to maintain that unity when the threat is endemic to our culture as it is with the dysfunctional healthcare economy, but for the winter of 2001/2002, we all seemed to be on the same page.

I compare and contrast this to my experience being in the building next door to the Virginia Tech shootings as they were going on, and as I watched kids jump from windows to escape.  

That was far more localized, obviously.  I did not fear for my personal safety, as I did not sense it to be an organized attack.  I wanted to get outside on the parade ground and offer assistance, but instead stayed locked in the admissions office behind bullet proof glass.  

At the time I felt cowardly.  Through the benefit of hindsight, I realize I would not have been able to add much in the way of value, just getting in the way of professionals.  Besides, they were not LETTING anyone out, so it is not as though I stayed silent as they asked for volunteers.

But I did not fear for my country at VT.  I felt empathy for the VT community, but not fear of prolonged attack as I felt for the nation on 9/11.  Hopefully these words do not minimize the anguish of that community.  It is compared to 9/11 more to highlight the jolt of that event in ways we should always try to remember.

We came together after 9/11 by acknowledging we had a national crisis.  Partisanship went dormant, for the most part, as we sought to work through it.  Some finger pointing between administrations of different parties took place, as is natural, and then, as time passed, it became much more acute.   We got mired again in policy differences and lost respect for the fact that we all had a common goal of simply trying to protect our borders from a kind of threat not before utilized in warfare.  

You cannot find in the Geneva Conventions last overhauled in 1949, for example, any kind of category that aptly describes terrorism save for simply calling them "Unlawful Enemy Combatants" because they are not uniformed.  The only real rule in those Conventions about Unlawful Enemy Combatants is that the rules do not apply.  It's the carrot and stick approach to compel nations to keep their armed combatants identifiable via uniform to protect the citizenry during times of war.  If that is not an ironic intention tough to wrap your head around, I do not know what is.

Closest comparison I can figure out is to consider terrorists spies.  Only spies operate with stealth to extract information rather than to exact carnage on, and to instill fear in,  the citizen population. 

Furthermore, a direct link to a country may not be a legitimate claim for terror, which also underpins the Geneva Conventions.  State against state rules of warfare.  

Sure, weak countries harbor them.  Some supportively, some out of fear like the fear we felt on 9/11.  But terrorists are not necessarily affiliated with a nation directly.  The lack of legal accommodation for this new threat makes our ability to agree on a national security approach all the more harder and heightens the name calling and accusations.  It also hurts our standing in the international community who experience these kinds of things more frequently than we do and do not provide the same freedom of movement within their borders as we do.

That the other party now controls the foreign policy levers will help there.  Both sides will have the exact same insights into the intelligence not prudent to share publicly.  We will slowly come to accept more of what the Bush administration did as Obama follows suit.  That Obama retained Defense Secretary Gates confirms this.  In time, we will shave off the rough edges of partisan excess from W's efforts as Obama modifies those over reaching initiatives I remain convinced were enacted with the noblest of intentions.

Furthermore, legal systems react, and the international legal system has yet to react to this new, technology-enabled threat that renders the rules of warfare obsolete.  A military history adage goes that generals are always prepared to fight the last war when the next one hits.  That happened to us on 9/11.

So for a while, at least, this day will hit each and every one of us in some way.  It is a little like the anniversary of the death of a loved one.  Over time, some of us will go through the day oblivious until there's a news blurb on it.  Over time, those news blurbs will become briefer and briefer the way mention of D-Day and Pearl Harbor have become over my lifetime.  

It happened to Civil War Remembrances over my Grandfather's lifetime.  It has happened to WWI and WWII Remembrances in my lifetime.

So we have to look for the silver lining in 9/11.  Recall our concern for country.  Recall our desire for unity and cooperation.  Remember us at our best at a time nationally when we seem to be at our worst trying to resolve our concerns over the healthcare system, that, while in no way, shape or form, comparable to 9/11, are still a very important topic to address in concert with the precarious nature of our economy right now.

9/11.  We as a nation did not stand still.  We stood strong because we stood together.  We compromised, and we acted. 

We should remember that, if nothing else, in hopes it will not take another jolt to our national psyche to get to focus on the opposition's positive ideas rather than their negative ones.