Remember Sept. 10, not just Sept. 11

Much of the nation this week is focused on remembering Sept. 11, 2001 — where people were, what they were doing and how the day changed things.

I'd like to focus on Sept. 10, instead.

The way a nation acts before a crisis can teach us as much as the way it acts after.

Sept. 10 was a sunny day in the mid-80s at Salt Lake International Airport, where passengers and non-traveling friends alike made quick trips through metal detectors and down to the gates. But my intent here isn't just to conjure nostalgic images.

If you turned on a cable news station that day, you were bound to hear endless chatter about one of two things — Gary Condit or shark attacks.

The shark story was beginning to wane with the summer sun. It never had much substance. It began with the gripping tragedy of a young boy whose arm was severed and whose uncle wrestled the offending shark to shore and recovered the arm. By September, every shark attack in the world had gotten sufficient attention to make us think a band of marauding sea creatures had held secret meetings and decided to strike humans in record numbers.

In reality, shark attacks that year were fairly close to normal.

Condit was a California congressman who had an affair with Chandra Levy, an intern 30 years his junior. She had mysteriously disappeared. Unfortunately, a lot of young women disappear each year, but the nation was obsessed with her because of the affair, Condit's position of power and a video of Condit in 1998 demanding President Bill Clinton come clean about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

Condit never was a suspect, other than by inference on television. Someone else entirely was convicted of Levy's murder nine years later. But to many, the congressman and the missing intern lover seemed so important.

That all changed when passenger planes rained from the skies and immovable skyscrapers fell like card houses in a wind. So did concerns in Utah about political redistricting and a Newsweek cover story titled, "A Mormon Moment."

On Sept. 10, you had to look hard to find the most important story of the day, and you wouldn't have recognized it if you saw it. In the Deseret News it ran on Page A4, a short story about how Afghanistan's Taliban rulers were keeping Western diplomats away from eight foreign aid workers who had been arrested for promoting Christianity.