Not Again

In his latest Against the Grain commentary, CBSNews.com's Dick Meyer looks at our first reactions to the crash of American Flight 587.

"I pray it's a regular crash. Oh god, not again," a friend wrote in one of the first emails that I received. Everyone had the same thought: New York, again. Nine in the morning, again. The computer screen that displays the traffic on this Web site screamed upward. Everywhere, guts wrenched.

My wife called me to make sure that friends of ours in Queens didn't live near the crash site. I instantly thought about whether I should call my kids at school to let them know we were all fine.

On September 11, by contrast, I was boarding a flight to New York when the first plane hit the World Trade Center. I saw the first smoke rise from the Pentagon as I sped back to the CBS News Bureau in Washington. All that morning, it never once occurred to me that my first grader and my fifth grader, knowing I was flying to New York, would be worried about me. It never occurred to me that such little kids would even be aware of what was happening.

Not this time. I fretted that they would ask me if it was going to be okay for us to fly over the holidays. If they had asked me that over the weekend, I would have answered, "Of course," dismissively. I've been hard on people who are scared about flying and jittery about anthrax. I felt badly about that Monday morning. And I clearly had no certain answers for the kids.

But it seemed like everything was settling back into place.

True, the politicians hadn't gotten their acts together enough to help make airports and airplanes more secure yet. (Of course, that's business as usual, too. Maybe Congress will finally get moving now. Maybe not.)

But despite all the warnings, the second wave of terror had not yet come. The anthrax-era was ebbing; no new cases had been reported in days. Halloween had passed. John Ashcroft and the Feds didn't have any answers yet, but had presided over a massive roundup of the usual suspects that seemed like it could have at least disrupted plotters. The anti-Taliban forces were making massive, sudden gains in Afghanistan. In Mazar-e-Sharif, women walked the streets without veils for the first time in years and were even allowed back into the central Mosque to pray, if they wanted.

Then New York was on fire again. And so were our stomachs.

By midday Monday, all indications were that the crash of American Airlines Flight 587 was not an act of terrorism. Nothing absolute yet, but it looked good. People were relieved. You could see it on the faces of people walking after lunch in downtown Washington, the sidewalks unhurried because of the Veteran's Day holiday. It was just a crash. That sounds so horrible: just a crash. That wouldn't matter to the victims and their familis, of course. But sadly, it matters to the rest of us.

I'm not sure if my kids will be scared to fly, but I don't think so. I hope not. If they are, if we can't reassure them, I'm no longer so certain what I would do. But one way or the other, we're going to Chicago.

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