A View from the Road.

This week I have been traveling on business, away from the normal routines that keep me anchored and I am better informed when I am anchored. Traveling on business is to be afloat on the sea of information rather than in it. I catch bits of news while moving from meeting to meeting, from restaurant to hotel but I tend to drift with little real contact.

Driving, there is no chance to read as there is on the subway when I am in New York and I find myself struggling in the mornings with my recalcitrant e-mail system rather than listening to news.

So all I have had are snapshots, verbal images from radio reports as I move from place to place.

>From the radio I have learned that John Edwards and John Kerry have been officially nominated by the Democrats; from the front page of my internet provider I learned that Teresa Heinz Kerry did not open mouth, insert foot and was generally well received in her first official bow to the nation.

Catching a moment of the Cafferty Report on CNN I was disturbed to hear him read an e-mail from someone who said they would find it offensive to have a First Lady who spoke with an accent.

That, of course, made me wonder how the people of California feel having the Governator?

Obviously the state didn't feel offended enough not to elect someone with a pronounced accent to lead them out of the morass they have found themselves in - though the "girlie man" verbal misadventure has some Californians with whom I have spoken suspect that if he'd been a native speaker that particular comment might have been avoided.

In Boston, the Democrats are officially sending Kerry and Edwards off to joust with Bush/Cheney and many a fair lady is sending some kind of talisman with them to encourage them to defeat the Republican scourge.

100,000 balloons will fall to celebrate the official moment and the race will be on.

Over lunch today, huddled in a restaurant [not because of cold but because of the noise level] two friends and I concurred that this is a very important election, setting a direction the country may follow for a generation.

I have declared myself for Kerry/Edwards. The dour Kerry would not have been my first choice for President BUT he is not a bad choice. Better than Dean. And mayhap even better than Edwards though I am delighted Kerry has chosen Edwards as his running mate.

This column began as a post 9/11 reaction. And what I have realized is that the whole world is a post 9/11 reaction.

Traveling this week there is not a person I have encountered for the first time that did not want to know my 9/11 story: where was I? What happened to me? How do I feel about New York now?

Everyone I met that had not known me wanted the details of my 9/11 experience. I have not offered but I have been consistently asked. I have no need to put it out there but everyone I have encountered has wanted to know my story.

What I have realized is this: 9/11 is America's story. Wherever you live in this country we are dealing with its aftereffects. As a result of that day, that moment, we have become a different country. The world has become a different place.

Young men and women are sweating out their lives in the Iraqi deserts while people we do not understand quite yet are doing their best to blow up our best. We have had Abu Ghraib and its atrocities and we live with the fact those were OUR atrocities.

Our reaction to that day, 9/11, and our response to it will be, as a country, played out in this year's election.