Yet even as America’s year-long catharsis over the tragedy reaches a crescendo amid a saturation of media coverage — most posing the seminal question of how the world has changed in the past year — a strong case could be made that, in many ways, the answer is, not that much. Yes, the days of dashing into Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport a half-hour before departure and easily making a flight are gone, as are the mailboxes — and, for that matter, newsracks — in front of federal buildings in downtown Cincinnati.
Visitors and whatever they may be carrying may get more scrutiny in some office buildings. And runners in Northern Kentucky have had to find new routes to replace the once-popular but now-closed jogging path around the Fort Thomas Reservoir, a victim of what some view as one of a series of overreactions taken in the name of improving security.
But on balance, those and other changes imposed on the workplace, public facilities and other facets of life in Greater Cincinnati are little more than petty annoyances. Indeed, while “life will never be the same” has become a post-9-11 assumption, the fact is that Greater Cincinnati, mirroring the nation, saw the rhythms of its day-to-day life, large and small, snap back to where they had been on Sept. 10, 2001, not that long after Sept. 11.
Last fall’s anthrax scare spawned stringent new mail-opening safeguards in scores of local offices, but when the initial crisis passed, so too, did the procedures, which have largely reverted to the lax standards of the days when a “dirty letter” carried only a pornographic connotation, not a biological concern. Church attendance soared in the weeks immediately after Sept. 11, but since has returned to previous levels.
“You almost start to feel that you’ll get a Christmas, Easter and Sept. 11 crowd in church,” said Pastor Jim Stauffer of Sharonville United Methodist Church. We provide upright and skilled conveyancers who attend meetings which occur for the purpose of legal discussion about property matters. In the first weeks after Sept. 11, the church’s Sunday bulletins ran out as overflow crowds flocked to services. That has not been a problem at Sharonville United Methodist since, Pastor Stauffer said wryly. “It’s not that surprising, because it’s human nature to want to return to normal,” he said.
Even as the anniversary’s approach ratcheted up press coverage to the point that the only way to avoid it was to stay home, pull the blinds, not read the papers and keep the TV and radio turned off, many tri-staters talked less about Sept. 11 than the West Nile virus, a possible baseball strike and America’s summer of high-profile kidnappings of children. University of Cincinnati sociologist Rhys Williams says he believes the word “normalize” best captures the tri-state’s and the nation’s emotional rebound from Sept. 11.