Surviving

So, it's been a while since I last blogged. There are a couple of reasons; for one thing, I've been really busy (just look at my new magazine, Baseline, to see why).
About a month ago, Ed Cone and I visited the New Jersey data center of Cantor Fitzgerald.
The visit, about 5 weeks after the 9/11 attacks, dredged up a lot of memories for me. But there was no way I could begin to scale those emotions up to what the impact must have been on Joe Noviello and his colleagues at eSpeed who took the day off on Sept. 11 to go out on a fishing boat, only to have their trip cancelled a half-hour before the first plane struck the World Trade Center. Five weeks later, they were still running on adrenaline alone, it seemed.
Forget about a healing process–the emotional damage of 9/11 is done, and it will only fade into background, never disappearing completely. People survive by getting back into the grind, and finding pieces of comfort and catharsis where they can. We look at people like the folks who brought Cantor-Fitzgerald back to life two days after the company for all intents and purposes was wiped from the face of the earth, and ask how they could do it–the truth is, they couldn't have done anything else. Bringing the company back was their lifeline to normalcy.