Since Sept. 11, the country that we’re living in is very changed. You can recognize it by the TSA lines at the airport, and you have to take off your shoes and your belt when you go through the Liberty Bell, and when you go into an office building you have to have your picture taken. All of these things, they seem rather modest sacrifices, but the invasion of privacy and all of the information the government accrues on you, that’s all different.

[I used to take my date] to Love Field when I was in high school. Back then, it was a cheap place to take a date. It was exotic back then. My date and I, we walked out onto the tarmac and climbed into a jetliner that I had imagined had just arrived from Paris, or something like that. We sat in the first-class department and a stewardess, as we called them then, brought us a snack, and then we walked up in the FAA tower. Doors unlocked. “Hey kids, come on in.” We sat there and watched them landing planes. That was America. That America is dead. Terrorism killed it.

My fear is that that America is not only gone, but it’s being forgotten because young people don’t know about that country. They don’t know what it was like to be in America at that time. I fear that if we forget it, we won’t be able to steer in that direction again. It will become a different country than the one that we were previously destined to be.