Staff Editorial: Pipes, parks, progress

One month ago today, the front page of this newspaper featured a story about a burst water pipe on 38th Street.

Not to be outdone, The Philadelphia Inquirer on that day devoted their newspaper's prime real estate to a feature story on the building of a park in Wissinoming.

Back then, the placement of both stories was highly appropriate, considering the circumstances of the day and each paper's respective audience. The burst pipe was disrupting water service to hundreds of Quad residents; hence the DP's choice to run it so prominently. The park in Northeast Philadelphia symbolized the rebuilding of a beleaguered neighborhood -- with no other major news, the Inquirer was free to offer it such nice placement.

Today, just one month later, it's likely that neither story would be grabbing those prime headlines.

There is no easy way to qualify exactly all that has changed since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. In one respect, very little is different at all -- our professors continue to teach, we continue to learn and most functions of our cozy college world continue to go about just as they did on Sept. 10 and all the days before.

In a much more meaningful sense, though, the destruction of the World Trade Center -- and, perhaps more importantly, the ensuing war against terrorism -- have fundamentally altered the way in which this nation carries out its everyday business. It has impacted the way people work, play and even think about their "normal lives."

Americans, by nature, are a resilient bunch. In one month, we've already grown accustomed to a sizeable security increase in our airports, train stations and on campus. We watch the news on TV, and accept the fact that some of our countrymen may not come home from their overseas odyssey. Many of us have even grown to accept, in just one month, that a pervasive fear -- of terrorism, of further retaliation, of the unknown -- may be part of our lives for years to come.

That fear, though, need not be the most dramatic change to come out of Sept. 11. Over just a few weeks, we have seen this nation and this campus come together in ways that would have previously been unthinkable. Here at Penn, that spirit of community was evident in the outpouring of support on Sept. 11, and in the $20,000 check that Penn students will donate to the Red Cross later today.

That spirit, hopefully, will be the enduring legacy of that horrible day and all that has followed it.

The one-month anniversary of tragedy, of course, is just a mark in time, an arbitrary way to measure events whose significance will last far longer. Someday, perhaps, we will be able to measure how this community -- this civilization -- has changed since Sept. 11. And someday, perhaps, the DP and the Inquirer will again be able to run pipe stories and park features without a second thought.

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