Persons of the Year

摘要

This was the year when thegrief started to lift and the worries came in. During the first weeks of 2002, two dark moods entered the room, twoanxieties that rattled down everybody's nerve paths, even on good days, and etched their particulars into thegeneral disposition. To begin with, after Sept. 11, the passage of time drew off the worst of the pain, but every month or so there came a new disturbance―an orange alert, a dance-club bombing in Bali, a surface-to-air missile fired at a passenger jet―that showed us the beast still at our door. In the confrontation with Iraq, in the contested effort to build a homeland defense, we all struggled to regain something like the more secure world we thought we lived in before the towers fell. But every step of the way we wondered―was this the way back? What exactly did we need to be doing differently?