It has been one year. The United States is still alive and free, though not the same.

al Qaeda is still alive and kicking, perhaps within the United States. The United States is under a high terrorism alert. Afghanistan is struggling to move forward with a democratic government. An overwhelming majority of Muslims do not believe the 9/11 attacks were carried out by Osama bin Laden, or by Arabs, or by Muslims, even though Al-Jazeera broadcasts tape of the hijackers planning the attacks and broadcasts tape of Osama bin Laden praising the hijackers. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict has escalated. And, instead of helping the region by stepping in and help resolving the conflict, the United States wants to piss off the entire world by going after madman Saddam Hussein by playing the terror card with no solid, tangible evidence.

The world is no longer the same.

We were all touched one year ago, one way or another. My sister Diane worked for a company that is headquartered in New York, blocks from the World Trade Center. Somebody that she worked with had bought a disposable camera after American 11 had already impacted the North Tower. He was in a conference room, taking pictures out the window, when United 175 streaked through the sky, impacting the South Tower. Here are a few of the pictures he took that day. If the first picture looks familiar, it was on page 328-329 of the September 2002 issue of Vanity Fair, as well as in the book Here Is New York: A Democracy of Photographs. I remember when Diane emailed the photos to me. It gave me a "link" to the event and I finally felt a little bit connected from hundreds of miles away - though I'm sure it's only a fraction of a percentage point of what it was like to actually be there.