Back to normal on four-month anniversary

New year, new semester, new news? Not lately. Campus is quiet, crime is down and our opinionated few seem to be without much to say. Perhaps it's the usual trend, JMU comes back from Winter Break to settle into a studious routine before attempting much else. Then again, this year has been anything but usual and routine.

Friday marked the four-month anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and no one here really seemed to notice. Four months ago we were attending candlelight vigils, protesting war and watching CNN like faithful parishioners. Students and alumni wrote about their experiences, their brushes with the incident and their lost love ones in literary journal articles, letters to the editor and angry columns condemning Osama bin Laden.

Now, we barely watch the news anymore, and when we do, it is a flickering of foreign names we don't recognize and a spattering of military actions we didn't know about. It seems many people are detached from happenings abroad, unable to be comprehended since many people are not intimately connected to what is going on. Those who haven't paid close attention to the continuing situation find it hard to go back and catch up at this point.

Aside from a casual mention here and there, the events following Sept. 11 seem to be on the back burner. It's not that we've forgotten, we've just moved on to other concerns. Our rate of recovery seems speedy though. After all, wasn't this "the day that would live in infamy," a turning point in our lives that would mark history forever? With the exception of those who lost loved ones and friends, the majority of campus seems as back to normal as possible.

Once again, our conversations have turned to the weekend's big party, what's playing at Grafton-Stovall Theatre and minor changes at The Festival. The nation even seems to have bounced back in many ways. The Jan. 14 cover of weekly news magazine U.S. News and World Report cites an economic comeback in the near future — maybe our holiday spending made all the difference. Likewise, a story on Google.com trends from Thursday's issue of The Breeze said that as the year turned our interests, online at least, turned to Harry Potter, George Harrison and video games.

But whatever the reason for our trend toward political apathy, the trend is nonetheless true. This outcome was predictable because it happens with every news event — we are sucked in by the newness of the news and once it passes it is old and forgotten. Like the O.J. Simpson trial and the disappearance of Chandra Levy this summer past, we are intrigued for a while and then we move on.

We were urged to move on after Sept. 11 by President George W. Bush, by JMU President Linwood Rose and by TV talk show hosts across the networks. It seems we may have done just that and become a society that does what it's told. Good or bad, if normalcy is what we seek to overcome tragedy, we are succeeding.