Five years ago today, I was getting back to work after a slow summer at my new consulting gig. My new project was finally starting, and I got up early to prepare for a teleconference that afternoon. I was working in my office on the third floor of my house, registering the bright blue sky showing through the skylights, but too happy about having some productive work to mind missing a beautiful day on the beach.

I had the radio on and heard the news about a plane hitting the World Trade Center. Visions of 24-hour O.J./Gulf War news coverage flashed in my head, and I quickly turned off the radio and shut down my web browser, not wanting to be inundated with reports about a wayward Cessna. I worked for another hour in productive silence when my mother called to make sure I was not flying out of Boston that day.

“Why?” I asked, not getting the connection between some private pilot’s suicide in New York and conditions at Logan.

Then I turned the news back on.

Since that last hour of innocence, the news has been on constantly. Today, when the gorgeous weather evokes memories of five years ago even more than the date, I’m trying to separate how I really feel about the attacks from what the media and the government, for different reasons, have been telling me to feel. I do feel shock and horror and sadness for the victims and their families. What I don’t feel, particularly, is fear. I was very afraid when I heard the news about the last plane crashing in Pennsylvania. The reports were relentless—it felt like plane after plane was falling out of the sky. But that was the last one that day, and the last one so far, five years later.

In the time between late September 2001 and today, I’ve flown an average of four times a month. I have not been afraid to fly, or rather, I have been far more afraid of pilot error than terrorism. It’s not that I’m naive enough to think they won’t try again; I just think that my chances of being caught in the next hit are very small, just as they were the first time.

The truth is that we are at war with terror, but terror is not really at war with us. The terrorists do not intend to disrupt our way of life; they are not sufficiently angered by gay marriage or working mothers to make the effort they would need to make to sow fear in the general population. If bombs were exploding at every other cafe and checkpoint, as they do in Iraq and Israel; if snipers were haunting every shopping mall; if chemicals were being released on subways, I would be terrified. My life would change. But these guys don’t want to do the groundwork or suffer the losses that that kind of organization would require. They want to make a huge splash, with little risk to those at the top. They want to make their plans from the relatively safety of a cave, and do something that will impress their terrorist friends and investors.

It’s the media and the government who have tried to instill in us a low but constant level of perpetual anxiety. Vote for me, or the terrorists will win. Watch us, or the terrorists will win.

No one wants to walk around ignorant of the facts, like I was for that quiet hour five years ago. But sometimes it’s good to turn it off and think for yourself.

I guess that’s what I’ll be doing as I move through security at Logan today.