On the hook of Bu$hleaguer, Eddie Vedder sings, "I remember when you sang that song about today, but now it's tomorrow, and everything has changed." The song is a rambling indictment of the second Bush presidency, and in the constellation of great Pearl Jam tracks, it does not appear.  But that hook makes my hairs stand on end.

The reason why, I believe, is that it perfectly encapsulates my feelings about 9/11 and our nation’s response to the attacks on that day.

I remember the songs we sang to ourselves, the stories we told ourselves.  We sang about a New American Century.  We were drunk on enthusiasm, bolstered by a decade of ascendance.  Cold War: over.  Tech Stocks: on the rise.  Middle East Peace: we found a path.  Federal Budget Surpluses: an actual thing that existed in reality.  MTV was still playing videos and there were new Star Wars films on the way.

We were definitely on our way towards a shinier, happier world.  It was obvious to anyone.  Even the foresighted and cynical characters of a Pynchon novel couldn’t see otherwise.

Then the 9/11 attacks happened, and in a single day, it became tomorrow, and everything changed.

I had never felt existential fear prior to those attacks.  I grew up at the tail end of the Cold War, but I was never frightened of nuclear holocaust the way prior generations tell me they were.  Terminator assured me that we would survive it.  Rambo assured me one bad-ass dude could prevent it.  I now realize how ridiculous I was being in the days after the attacks, how foolish it was to be worried about terrorists attacking some suburbs of Dallas.

I never felt guilt about not enlisting in the military prior to those attacks.  For a brief moment in high school, I flirted with becoming a marine to cure myself of my lazy aimless nature, but I didn’t feel bad about not following through with it until there was a them who attacked us.  As the realities of the wars we launched in response to the attacks sunk in, I no longer felt guilty about not signing up to fight our enemies, but I developed a different nagging guilt.  A lot of my good buddies did enlist out of high school.  Why wasn’t I sacrificing alongside them?

It seems so trite to say the world changed that day.  And of course, it really didn’t change that day.  But our collective perception of it did change.  My perception of it changed.  The song we sang, the story we told, no longer made sense of our experience.  I thought we were in a story by Gene Roddenberry, full of promise and on the path to utopia.  Now I think we are in a story by William Gibson, or worse, Philip K. Dick.