the same question everyone is asking.

seven-thirty am, eastern standard time, and i've already seen six different headlines on four different news sources screaming the theme of the day: "what has changed since five years ago?" some of them have been yelling this for days, working up to a massive national remembrance that will dwindle article by article each decade until it merits nothing more than a line of small type on calendars and a few interviews with one of the handful left living who can describe where they were when it happened. in an ideal world this wouldn't occur -- we'd always remember how it felt -- but human nature has a fleeting attention span and a very short memory.

i'll admit that i rarely think of it until something triggers me, but obviously it is still fresh enough of a wound that i had to shut off cnn's "real time" remembrance coverage after about five minutes of pentagon flashbacks. cnn is my main television news network (prize awarded to them solely on basis of having the highest concentration of reporters who are worth a damn. aka: actually doing their jobs in the check and balance system!) and i understand the need to look back at every small detail to remember what really happened as opposed to what our politicos have warped and twisted to fit their own pr agendas. but the creepy crawly sick feeling comes back with every plume of videotaped smoke.

five years ago on september 11th, i had just turned twenty years old. i'd recently dropped out of college (long story for another day), had moved back home, and was existing in the weird limbo of not knowing what the hell i was doing after a lifetime of possessing a reasonable facsimile of adult-level personal control. i was sleeping, waking up to my father in the doorway. for three and a half hours i didn't move from the couch, frozen in a state of horror and fear. i went to work that day but felt a sinking sensation the entire time -- feeling like an animal with my foot in a trap. i remember watching the president's speech a few nights later from the bar in a shitty bowling alley in a lot next to the river, and looking at the faces around me riveted to the television like children desperately wanting their mother to make life butterflies and sunshine again. i thought to myself that we were in a whole damned lot of trouble.

so when i ask myself what i've taken away with me from that day five years ago, very little of it is positive. cynicism, distrust of government and media -- those things already existed in me; however after that day they multiplied. i find myself living in this modern world and not recognizing too much of it, though i've managed to function as best i can. i only feel the cold fear and panic alone in the middle of the night, when sleep evades me. more often it takes the form of an open-mouthed boggling at every distortion of reality and decency that worms its way into my senses.

i want to believe in the goodness of this country that's been fed to me out of my history books. i want to believe in the kinder, gentler nature of the human race. i want to believe that good and evil really are polar opposites and not merely a quagmire of gray opinion. it gets increasingly difficult to hold on to even a shred of hopeful innocence in the face of an assault that defies the existence of such things and champions only the worst.

in the end, that's the crusade i'd like to think september 11th has left us with: not a matter of triumphing over the evils of others which we've pointed out with our own dirty little fingers, but a matter of holding on to a little bit of goodness in spite of this world, in spite of ourselves. five years later and we still don't look so good.

when i turned on the television this morning, the movie channel it had been left on was running pleasantville. the irony is not lost on me.