“The advice that I would give to people today, if they’re home from work, is to — is to go about a normal day,” Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said on Sept. 12, 2001. “Take the day as an opportunity to go shopping, be with your children. Do things. Get out. Don’t feel — don’t feel locked in.”

Go shopping.

Mr. Giuliani’s common-sense counsel on the day after a terrorist attack killed 2,753 people in Lower Manhattan was quickly stripped of context and turned into caricature — retail as opiate. When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping.

I don’t think he meant that shopping would solve the problems of a city struggling to awaken from an unparalleled nightmare. But it was the first thing that came to his mind.