When I think back to the moment I saw the second plane hit the World Trade Center live on the “Today Show,” I always see it in slow motion, similar to watching the minivan door sliding toward my daughter’s fingers still clutching the edge. I could see what was going to happen in freeze frames, but it was happening so quickly that there was no way anyone could stop it.

I became much more careful, and slid the car door shut much slower, after my daughter’s fingers were smashed. I learned my lesson, and you’d better believe she became more careful about where she put her fingers even though there was no blood and no broken bones and, five minutes later, her tears had dried.

Smashed fingers are pretty insignificant compared with the attacks of Sept. 11, — whose effects were horrific and far-reaching, changing the course of world events. But on this anniversary of Sept. 11, I wonder how much our behavior has changed since that day. What lessons have we learned?

Although Islamic fanatics told us what they intended to do, on Feb. 26, 1993, they bombed the World Trade Center, killing six people and injuring about a thousand. Appearing on Oliver North’s Fox News Channel “War Stories” program, Walid Phares, author of “Future Jihad,” said: “We did not respond. ... There was something utterly wrong in the fact that the jihadists were marching and the victims of that jihad in the ’90’s were not even responding.” It took the attacks of Sept. 11, to elicit any significant response.

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Writing about the sixth anniversary of Sept. 11, a blogger at BookwormRoom.com wrote: “I mourn the dead, but I also mourn the death of my culture, the division of my world into ‘before’ and ‘after.’ For my kids, it’s always going to be an ‘after’ life, but for so many of us, the world on that day was neatly divided into two temporal halves.

“Many, the ones who identify themselves as progressives, seem to have opted for a regressive point of view, desperately trying to fit themselves into the past half, the world that was one of easy pieties about rich and poor, empire and third world, haves and have nots. Others, myself included, felt that when the smoke cleared, it revealed a new era — one that had always been hinted at in 1979 and 1983 and 1993, but [one] that we’d refused to see. We see it now.”

One thing we learned following Sept. 11 was that this country performs best when its citizens are united in a common goal. Unfortunately, following the heroic response to the attacks, breakdowns occurred between those living in a pre-9/11 and a post-9/11 world over how best to prevent a similar future event. Last year, Michael Tanji asked, “Five years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, we face many threats at home and abroad, yet our response has been mostly superficial and expedient. One is left to wonder: Are we serious about winning this fight?”

At Threatswatch.org last week, Tanji answered his own question: “Getting the majority of the country behind a strategy for fighting those that would end us is more important than getting half of the country behind a particular strategy.

“Politically speaking,” he wrote, “we’re still a mess. We’ve recently improved our ability to monitor terrorists thanks to a new online surveillance law, but the rending of hair and gnashing of teeth over the effort was staggering in its display. No legislator [who] actually understands the problem or read the legislation had reason to doubt the need for such capability, but that didn’t stop any of them from using the issue as a political football.”

Bruce Kesler at Democracy-Project.com pointed to one post-9/11 lesson we should have learned from the war in Iraq: the “central importance of closely listening to the military. ... It has the resources and the will to plan, and the dedicated professionals to follow through.”

He pointed out a corollary lesson that should have been applied from the days of President Jimmy Carter on forward, “but especially under [President Bill] Clinton, when the challenges became so manifest, we half-stepped in our learning and preparations for a quarter century. That added to the errors of not having sufficient forces from the get-go. ...

“It’s the same old story: prepare, prepare, prepare or regret, regret, regret.”

It remains to be seen whether our national will, and our resulting preparations, will be sufficient to prevent regrets over a future Sept. 11.

Lorie Byrd is a member of The Examiner’s Blog Board of Contributors and blogs at wizbangblog.com.