You get used to it after a while. That’s what most people who live close to railroad tracks or airports would say. In the beginning the intensity of the noise is startling and nerve racking. The blare of a train’s whistle is painfully loud.

Helicopters trigger an instinctive sense of alarm. The enormous mass of a jet plane over your head is frightful. You wonder how you could ever sleep through such a din, or how long your house could stand up to the shaking. Most alarming is the thought of a derailment or crash landing in your backyard.

Of course those fears subside, and within a few months you are surprised at how often you don’t notice the comings and goings of these massive machines. Consciously or subconsciously, the sounds and the earth vibrations have become part of your sense of time and place, your milieu. The passing of a train at night has a soothing rhythmic effect, like rocking in a cradle.

I live a couple hundred yards from an emergency medical heliport that transports local patients to Buffalo or Erie. The choppy sound of the rotary engine has become familiar, as have their circuitous maneuverings as they approach the helipad. (As a Catholic, there is also the involuntary reflex of making the sign of the cross as the copter departs.)

My home is also three houses north of the Norfolk Southern railroad line, which I can see clearly from an upstairs window. Sometimes when there is a slow train, I can read the murals on the sides of the boxcars – giant colorful cartoons and symbolic lettering with cryptic messages. At night, bright red flashing lights and warning bells set the wishbone crossing gates into motion, their robotic arms jerking down to block the road. Minutes later the arms draw back, and the tail lights of a line of cars begin to stretch forward like a string of rubies.

These are romanticized views, and I use them as a preface to something more important.

During COVID, my little world became a lot quieter. At first, the environmentalist in me appreciated the major reduction in noise and air pollution. The skies seemed bluer, cleaner. However, it was an eerie quietude, unnatural in the modern world, and there was a growing nostalgia for the return of what I had known as normal.

Flash back further and all of us in WNY can recall the perfectly clear, windless blue day in September, 2001 when commercial airplanes were weaponized by terrorists to destroy American morale.

See NATION, Page D6

The Twin Towers exploded, the Pentagon was breached, and suddenly our railways and skies went silent. No one could predict how long the silence would last.

As a nation, we survived those horrific episodes. For years now, trains have resumed their rumble and rattle along the steel rails, and silver wings streak across the sky leaving plumes of white in their wake. Americans have gone about their business-as-usual ways, and the effects of those times are in the rear view mirror – vague and uncomfortable memories.

Yet through our collective convalescence, much of America seems to have reverted to an attitude of entitlement. No matter how much of a beating the world economy has taken because of the pandemic, there is an expectation that we should be better off than we were before, like nothing ever happened, or that whatever happened was one someone else’s fault and they should pay for all the damage. Too many assume that America is exceptional while forgetting that it is our democracy and its complex institutions that provide the basis for exceptionalism.

When I lie in bed at night listening to a passing train, I no longer imagine a crescendo of timpani, a herd of Buffalo, or a sweet-dreams lullaby. I can’t help but think about far away places – Gaza and Ukraine – where there is no romanticizing about giant vehicles. Ordinary citizens in those places lie sleepless, in fear of the machines, for they come not as means of transportation or recreation, but as missionaries of death and destruction. Sirens, missiles, tanks, bulldozers, jet bombers – those are the sounds they hear and fear, day and night.

I, like most Americans, can barely imagine what it is like in those places; only those soldiers and doctors and nurses who have experienced the violence of war can really understand. Yet I can express my opinion (a freedom afforded me through our Constitution) that we ought to think more about those victims of war, to support efforts to find solutions, and to complain less about how much it costs for a tank of gas or a pound of ground beef.