Last Wednesday, relatives and friends of New York firefighter Gerald Baptiste gathered for a funeral to remember him and to praise his selfless service. He was last seen four years ago today, on the 33rd floor of the World Trade Center's north tower, helping people to safety, but his remains were not positively identified until just recently.

Baptiste's funeral is a subtle reminder of how close we are to 9/11, a date that now rolls easily off the tongue and that, like Elvis or the Fourth or Gettysburg, needs no qualifier, no year, no further explanation. It is a term hard-wired into our national identity.

There are other little reminders. One is that relatives of the heroes on United Flight 93 and the National Park Service last week announced the winner of a design contest for a memorial that will stand in the remote field in Pennsylvania where the plane slammed into the ground four years ago today. The Sept. 11 commission concluded that passengers aboard the plane, alerted by cell phones that their hijackers were likely staging an attack on either the Capitol or the White House, stormed the cockpit and forced the crash — an awesome act of putting country ahead of self.

The relatives say that act shows the power regular individuals can wield against evil. One told Scripps Howard News Service, "Al-Qaida had been handed its first defeat by a small group of unarmed individuals, all regular people the morning they boarded the plane. It was a ray of hope and triumph on that day that needs to be spotlighted for all history."

Four years ago today; so why does it seem like so much longer ago? Why does the national unity, the communal mourning and the feeling of shock that made all other pursuits seem trivial now resonate like some quaint memories from the 1940s rather than from the 21st century?

Perhaps because we tend to view the nation only from lenses set up in Washington. Despite its place as the seat of representative government, the picture from there is seldom truly representative.

After the attacks four years ago, members of Congress assembled spontaneously to sing "God Bless America." Today, not quite two weeks after a natural disaster that was more devastating than 9/11, the same folks seem unwilling to harmonize about much of anything. And the president might as well be paddling on driftwood in Lake Pontchartrain.