(Throughout the day our correspondents will be sharing their thoughts on the tenth anniversary of 9/11. All of these posts can be found here.)

I GOT to work early that morning, for whatever reason. I was living in Brooklyn and working in midtown and was at my desk shortly after 8am. A short time later someone who worked down the hall from me came in: I just saw the weirdest thing, he said. This plane was flying super-low over the west side. He kept walking toward his desk. I turned back to mine. We turned the TV on maybe half an hour later, just in time to see the second plane hit.

That afternoon was sunny and clear. I was walking uptown with my almost-wife, who lived downtown and couldn't get home, behind a short, pudgy Englishman on a cellphone. He was laughing: "What else can you do in wartime but get drunk?" Oh, shit, I remember thinking, I guess it's wartime. He was in a Wall Street suit, grey with purple chalk stripes, with ash on the shoulders and in his hair. When I finally made it back to my place in south Brooklyn, five days later, I found I had left my windows open, and on the windowsill was that same human ash, thick by the window, thinning as it ran onto the floor.

Two scenes from the following weeks stick with me. A subway station in Brooklyn, morning rush hour. On the iron-bar fence surrounding a playground a block away from the station hang printed-out pictures. Missing. Worked on the 86th floor, the 72nd floor. Please call. They will hang there through the winter, until weather gets the better of them. In the station, a quartet of cops stand at a table by the ticket window, looking for bags to search. A woman heading into the station calmly plops her bag down on the table and opens it, voluntarily. One of the cops thanks her and smiles, tells her it's OK; if they need to search her bag they'll ask her.

Early evening, probably early October, the Lower East Side, a corner with restaurants on either side. A fire truck trundles up the street. Spontaneously, the crowd at both restaurants stands and applauds. Many of them—many of us—are crying. From the passenger side window a fireman raises his hand, almost imperceptibly, in thanks. He's a heavyset white guy with an expression of fatigue like I've never seen before. The brief hand-lift looks like all he can manage.

What has happened since then? The world has changed in too many ways to recount. Soldiers have replaced cops and firemen in America's pantheon of heroes, and everybody hates New York again (a friend joked that the World Series that fall featured the Arizona Diamondbacks against the United States Yankees). Of all of those memories, the notion that one would open a bag voluntarily—would submit to surveillance as an act of goodwill and civic duty—seems particularly anachronistic. Volunteering has nothing to do with it anymore. Between the Patriot Act, the establishment of the Transportation Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security, Americans are subject to far more surveillance than a free people should be.

Osama bin Laden did not succeed in his loony goal to unite the world under a Muslim caliphate. But he did succeed in dragging us into two wars in the Muslim world. A significant portion of the American public seems to believe that the first amendment does not apply to Islam or Muslims, and that sharia law is a creeping existential threat to America. It is not. America will not become a Muslim nation anytime soon (neither will western Europe, despite what some hysterics think). The threat is that we become—I should say, continue to become—in numerous small ways, less American.