On Saturday, Greg and I were in Chicago to visit a goddaughter, and we took a brief cruise that took us down the Chicago River and out into Lake Michigan. The tour guide mostly talked about … skyscrapers. Because we were mostly looking at … skyscrapers.

That was two days before today’s 9/11 anniversary, and yet I felt a little funny looking at all these soaring structures. It’s hard not to be amazed every time you see what people can do with stone and steel, and yet it’s impossible not to feel a little anxious when you see them there. Almost — what? — protective? How strange is that? But it’s true. After 9/11, there seems like something almost vulnerable about seeing something so imposing, so dominating and so classically American as a skyscape.

That’s just a primitive sort of reflexive emotion, of course. What are the odds that anything would happen right then while I was looking? But then, what were the odds that 9/11 could’ve happened, if you had asked anyone before 9/11? It doesn’t matter how many anniversaries we have with how many well-spoken opinions and reminiscences. For most of us, 9/11 is one of those things that will divide your life into before and after.

I can’t watch a lot of the anniversary material. I don’t know which is worse — the times when the productions are so trite or maudlin or politically-spun that I can’t feel a thing, or the times when they’re so understated and evocative that I can.

I managed to watch the first part of “The Path to 9/11,” though part of me didn’t want to, and I’ll watch the second part — the 9/11 part — tonight. There seems like sense in that, as a five-year anniversary exercise. It’s worth taking a serious look at the mistaken attitudes — complacency, denial, perhaps even a little of the arrogance we’re so often accused of — and the other factors — our own bureaucracy, administrative and intelligence incompetance — that we can change. There’s not much we can change of the Islamofascists’ hatred of us. We can’t change that when they saw the World Trade Center full of innocent people they saw neither innocence nor people. We can protect buildings better now. In fact, it seems more unlikely all the time that al Qaeda will ever get a blow like that again. But it did happen, and if the opportunity isn’t there, the murderous hatred still appears to be. That’s really what has the more lasting effect, it seems.