Like Billy Joel once sung, I am in a New York state of mind this week. Thinking about where I was 20 years ago, watching the towers collapse from a vantage point in my town in Long Island. Thinking about the two friends that lost their lives that day, Mark Bingham and Tom Kelly. There are certainly plenty of TV programming to choose from this week, as Deadline summarizes.

By way of background, I have spent half of my life living in Long Island: born in Bay Shore, grew up in Levittown and Merrick, then went to college, only to return for a year to live in the pre-gentrified Brooklyn before leaving to go to grad school. Eventually I came back in my 30s to live in Port Washington, where I raised my daughter, served on the local school board, and established my own business. Port Washington lost about a dozen people on 9/11, which was less than its neighboring community Manhasset did on that day.

For most of the last 20 years, I have been living in the Midwest. Every so often, I miss the hustle and bustle of NYC. This is one of those times. This was going to be a tough anniversary. Covid, cancer, travel restrictions, floods and tornadoes in New Jersey! It does seem like End of Days.

I have been watching the NatGeo/Hulu series on what happened that particular day. It is an amazing piece of journalism, linking images of many of the heroes caught on film in 2001 with contemporary interviews. One of them is an interview with Bingham’s mother and highlights his role in thwarting the hijackers of United 93, and how proud she is of him. The series shows the level of heroism from both those who survived and those who perished. We see the firefighters trying to figure out how to save lives but losing their own. It is a hard film to watch, but it gave me hope in humanity and highlighted some of the day’s heroes.

Now, the notion of what constitutes a hero has been somewhat devalued in the past 20 years, but these were folks who put themselves in harm’s way and considered the plight of others before themselves. One guy was buried under the rubble of one of the collapsed towers with someone else. He first helped free that person, who immediately fled, leaving the first guy to fend for himself. You see him today all healthy and hale, then what he looked like back in 2001, all bloody and torn up from trying to squeeze through the pile of concrete and glass.

As many of you know, I have volunteered as a freelance journalist for my local Red Cross chapter, profiling some of the many volunteers who have given far more time and service towards helping others during many disasters. This week you can read my profile of Mickey Shell (and numerous others) when he went to NYC to help out after 9/11. It was the first time he visited the area from his home in Poplar Bluff, Mo. He is a mental health professor who gave comfort to the survivors, and learned how to navigate the complexities of the NY subway system as part of his deployment.

With 9/11, we came together as one – mostly. Sure, there was the attack on an Indian restaurant in Port Washington by some local louts. They didn’t quite get that Sikhs (who owned the place) wore turbans too and had nothing to do with the 9/11 hijackers, Arabs, or the middle east for that matter. Not much has changed today — we have attacks on various Asians that had nothing to do with transmitting Covid. There will always be haters. And now we have thousands of Afghan refugees that arrived in our airports over the past few weeks to try to assimilate, protect, and give opportunities for a new life. Let’s hope there are still some heroes to go around.

One of the simplest methods of communication with the top executive in your state is anything but. This week I tried to find the email address for my governor, Mike Parson, but all I got was a lousy web form on the state website. Yes, I could fill out the form, but I wanted to track our correspondence (wishful thinking, I know) through my email client. Alas, it was not meant to be.

This turned into A Project. Turns out many states aren’t so transparent about their email addresses. Surely they must use email to conduct state business. But finding out these actual addresses well, that is another matter.

Yes, almost every governor’s office phone number is easily discoverable from numerous online sources. And part of me wanted to call each one and ask what the appropriate email address is, just to hear the staffer sputter or put me on hold. You can go to this document, maintained by the National Governors Association, which lists both phone numbers and postal addresses for all of them, including territories. There is a separate document that links to various social media addresses. But email? Nope. You can see the data here for the first few lines:

(NGA, you might want to spend the minutes it might take to add another column to this document and become useful to those of us who want to use email.)

A quick check of several nearby states shows Missouri isn’t alone in relegating constituent queries to a web form: the state websites of Illinois, Kentucky, Iowa and Maryland also just have these forms on their governors’ pages, with no mention of their chief executive’s actual email address. That’s annoying. I tried to decode the underlying HTML of the forms, but I wasn’t smart enough to suss it out.

This reminds me of a story that I wrote many years ago, at the dawn of the internet era. I was searching for computer tech support information, and back then we didn’t have Google and most vendors barely had FTP servers, let alone websites that had this information. But that was the 1990s. Those that had email responders didn’t really staff them for timely answers either. That article btw is notable in how many companies have gone to dust (Lycos? Compuserve? Memories.)

There is a source of governor emails, and it comes from an odd place: Rick Halperin, a history professor at Southern Methodist University. Not wanting to link to an outdated document, I emailed him and asked if he keeps the document up to date. Within minutes he replied (thanks Rick! Governor staffers, please note.), saying thanks for reminding him and yes, link away. So there you have it. To paraphrase that infamous cartoon, on the internet, everyone knows you are a dog if you work for a state government.

Now I am under no expectations that my governor — or any other — is actually going to read his or her emails. Or that anyone will actually respond with anything other than a form letter. But if you want to comment on this piece, I will take the time to write back.