9/11/06: “We Have Defined Normal Again”

On 9/11/01, Aaron Brown was the face of CNN. Last night on the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, he reflected on the mood of the country five years later:

“Humans have to define for themselves a sense of normalcy. You can’t survive. We can’t as people survive without some sense of normal. And so people in the most horrible situations define normal and to some extent I think we have defined normal again. I actually worry about the reverse of that — that we too readily forget what actually happened there.

I was reading, this morning actually, little capsules in the New York Times about the survivors, widows, parents who lost children, and what have you. And you realize for them, five years is a blink of an eye. And we go on with our lives, and we should go on with our lives, it’s important to go on with our lives, but we ought to go on — not that I should be preaching to people — we ought to go on with our lives with at least some memory of what happened that day and where we’re going to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”