Last weekend, Howard Fineman – speaking on the Chris Matthews Show – articulated why we chose this year’s season topic (It’s the End of the World as We Know It, And I Feel Fine) and first Dinner at the Square (9/11, The Heart of America, The Shadow of the Middle East) like he was actually inside our heads:

“Ten years on in some respects it’s remarkable how seemingly normal things are. But they aren’t normal. They just seem normal. We’re much much more in debt than we were. It’s not just the $4 trillion that Brown university counted, we cut taxes furiously, we printed money furiously – all in an effort to keep the economy afloat, which is really what Osama Bin Laden was attacking when he attacked the world trade center. so we spent trillions of dollars to create the illusion that nothing has changed. In fact everything has changed.

And we have yet as a society, really, to examine openly and argue about how to deal with the consequences of what happened ten years ago. The American people are like that, we like to look ahead, we don’t like to pick at the entrails of the past. And because we haven’t done so, we haven’t healed. And it shows in the budget debate, the division in our society which are really driven by things that began 10 years ago but that we still don’t want to acknowledge.”

(Photo credit: Brian Snelson)