It’s now been 22 years since four airplanes were hijacked and sent to destroy American buildings, and I am surprised to say that there seems to be less attention this year on what happened on September 11, 2001 than in past years. Maybe I am just imagining that, but that’s the way it seems to me.

Had we ever been attacked before? The British invaded the new United States of America in 1812 – quite some time ago. Of course, there was the devastating Civil War, but that didn’t involve an external attack, that was more of a family implosion. And then there was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Oahu Island in Hawaii, but in 1941, Hawaii was not a state, just an outlying territory of the country.

Of course, for reasons sometimes clear to me and sometimes not, the United States is quite a bellicose nation. We have been involved in war after war, but they were always somewhere else. No other country has fought so many wars in so many far off places when its own territorial integrity or security was not directly under threat. And I guess that’s the way we thought it should be. We were different, exceptional, protected by two oceans, and by neighbors north and south that couldn’t stand a chance, even if they did want to attack us. And we were economically powerful and wanted to stay that way, with an arms industry more than happy to weaponize the rest of the world and send our own military into action. But it was always somewhere else.

Then came the end of World War II, and the 1946 announcement that the Soviets had “the bomb”. Along with slogans like “We will bury you”, and Communist insurrections being fomented in all sorts of places, for the first time in over a century, a war fought on our own continental territory, perhaps through a nuclear attack, became a possibility. And we who were growing up in St. Louis were told that we would be the third most likely target for the Russians, after New York and Washington, because of the presence of McDonnell Aircraft’s jet plane assembly facilities and the other arms contractors who populated our area. Not that we, as kids, took this too seriously, but serious it was.

The fear of Russian attack generally faded, as did the Soviet Union itself, but by this time there had been a spread of nuclear weapons – bombs could come from Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, South Africa and eventually North Korea. But they didn’t. All was quiet, as they say, on the western front.

But, at the same time, as a result of all sorts of things, including the continuing (and still continuing) problems between Jews and Muslims in what I will term greater Israel, and other intercessions by the West into Arab and other Islamic states throughout out the 20th century, there developed a highly anti-American version of Islamic fundamentalism. The rhetoric was chilling.

But, so what? What could they do?

Then came September 11, 2001.

It was a beautiful day – the sky was sky blue, the temperature probably in the 70s, the humidity non-existent. A perfect pre-autumn day in Washington, DC. I had a scheduled breakfast meeting with a client, who had flown in the night before from Los Angeles, at the Capitol Hilton on 16th Street at 8 a.m. We had a meeting later in the day at the Department of Housing and Urban Development and our breakfast meeting was to make sure we were ready for that meeting. But I knew the client well, and last minute preparation wasn’t really necessary, so our breakfast was more social than anything else. We saw on the TV in the Hilton coffee shop that an airplane had flown into one of the two World Trade Towers in New York.

We thought that was interesting, we joked about the plane that flew into the Empire State Building in “King Kong”, we hoped no one was seriously hurt (although we assumed the pilot of what we knew must have been an errant small plane had met his end), and we left the hotel and grabbed a cab to HUD’s DC Area office, then (now, maybe as well) located in the same building as CNN on First Street NE, near the U.S. Capitol.

Things seemed a bit more ominous as we drove to the HUD office listening to the radio in the taxi. When we got to the CNN/HUD building, we were told at the concierge desk that people were leaving, and that the government offices were closing.

We thought we should check for ourselves. We still didn’t know exactly what was happening, and my client had flown 3000 miles just for the meeting that had been scheduled for some time. Maybe the people we were meeting with stayed, knowing we were coming.

We got in the elevator. There were two or three or four others in the elevator; they all worked at CNN. They told us that they were sure that the HUD office would be closed, but that we should come up to CNN with them, that there were multiple televisions in the lobby and we were welcome to watch and see what was happening.

This is what we did. No, I can’t tell you that we met either the TV anchors or the weather girls, but we did stand around amazed at what was happening for an hour or so. And then we left.

I really don’t remember much about the rest of the day. I don’t remember what my client did; I think we split up and he was going to go to the airport to get a flight back to California. Of course, this did not happen. I don’t remember seeing him again that day, so maybe he was one of those who grabbed a rental car and headed cross-country. I just don’t remember.

I do remember walking on 17th Street near Farragut Square later that morning (I think, morning), the weather still perfect, and hearing about the attack on the Pentagon (we didn’t then know whether any of the building remained, or what the casualties would be), and seeing ambulances and other emergency vehicles on the street, sirens blaring from all directions. The sidewalks were jammed with people who had left their offices and were presumably heading home, or somewhere else to figure out what was really going on. I don’t remember exactly when I heard about the fourth plane that crashed in rural Pennsylvania.

After I got home, I presume we spent the night glued to the television, but I don’t remember that, either.

So, there had finally been an attack on American soil, killing 3000 or so people. It wasn’t carried out by an enemy country. And it took a while to figure out that the planes were taken over by men who were ready to die (or, as they would say, be martyred) for their cause. And that they all had a loyalty to an outfit called Al-qaeda, led by a Saudi named Osama bin Laden, about whom we knew absolutely nothing. That virtually all of the participants were Saudi. That most of the participants were educated (in the west, some in the U.S.) and middle class or above. And that the FBI and other agencies had, in fact, over time many clues that something was brewing, but either failed to connect the dots or didn’t take things seriously enough.

So here we are 22 years later. There have been no more (at least successful) terrorist attacks. Our initial attempts to find bin Laden in the Torabora mountains were completely unsuccessful. We went into an irrelevant and highly destructive war in Iraq based on false pretenses and disinformation, with enormous American and especially Iraqi casualties and blows to our reputation. Years later, we finally caught and killed Osama bin Laden who had been hiding out in plain sight in Pakistan, where we were also engaged in military operations, not against Al-qaeda, but against the Taliban. And that we had little to gain from either of these tragic operations, and if fact we seem to have gained nothing.

Have we learned anything at all from this experience? I don’t know. Time will tell. My guess is we haven’t. We never seem to. Why should this time be different?

How should we remember 9/11? Or is it better to forget about it altogether?