5:21 p.m.

Something strange happened. Something really strange.  Something impossible.

If it had happened on any other day in any other city, we might still be demanding an answer.  But because it happened at 5:21 p.m. on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, the impossibility of it all has dissolved in the pulverized rubble of our collective subconscious.

The entire day had been full of impossibilities, after all.  We were in shock.  There was so much information being thrown at us.  We were running on instinct, adrenaline, and a macabre fascination with watching the human drama associated with that morning's events.  It seemed like the movies that we had paid so much money to see in theaters.  Only this show was free.  And it was real.

The events of that day are now a blur in the rear view mirror.  And, along with our consciousness of it, Building 7 of the World Trade Center (WTC) disappeared into the ever-darkening shadows of history.

Building 7 was a massive 47-story, steel-frame structure.  It was taller than the tallest buildings in some major American cities.  It was the kind of building that, if it were almost anywhere else, people could not help but notice.  But in lower Manhattan, on that particular day, it disappeared in just seven seconds.  Seven seconds of impossibility.  It was there, and then it wasn't.

Some did notice, though.  It's disappearance was immediately mentioned on news broadcasts as an "oh-by-the-way."  Dan Rather observed that its collapse looked like a controlled demolition.  As did New York's local anchors and reporters.  Even over a few years that followed, some celebrities added their voices to a chorus of thousands of architects and engineers who just could not believe that the laws of physics and chemistry could be completely usurped by the government.

Earlier on that day, WTC Buildings 1 and 2 had collapsed after being hit by planes.  Thousands had been killed.  Firefighters and police were busy trying to save lives.  Many of them died, too.  And many more would die over the following years from exposure to hazardous chemicals while begging the government to help them.  Those two buildings, people covered in powder running for their lives, and a haboob of debris rolling down Manhattan streets is what we remember.  Building 7 was just an "also ran."  It could not compete for our attention with the human drama that had begun to unfold eight hours earlier.

Even though the collapse of Buildings 1 and 2 defied scientific explanation, there was a least the structural damage and the jet fuel to make their collapse somewhat plausible to the uninformed and unscientific armchair patriots who comprise the vast majority of people in the United States.  After all, we saw what we saw. The planes were the cause.  Planes that, we were told, were flown by people with strange names from strange places who did it for strange reasons.

Building 7's collapse was different, though.  There was no plane to make a big hole.  There was no flaming jet fuel to melt steel contrary to the laws of science.   According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), it simply collapsed because office furnishings caught on fire.  There had been, and would be, worse fires in steel-frame skyscrapers, though.  In 1970, a 50-story New York building had burned for six hours on five floors; it did not collapse. In 1988, a 62-story Los Angeles skyscraper had burned for 3.5 hours on five floors; it did not collapse. In 991, a 38-story Philadelphia building burned for 18 hours on 8 floors; it did not collapse. In 2004, a 56-story building burned for 17 hours on 26 floors, and even it did not collapse.  On 9/11, the world had never experienced the melting of stuff that could not melt.

As they say, "only in America...."

Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, an organization of over 3,000 architects, engineers, and people with expertise in related fields,  continues to call for a new investigation - but to no avail.  Unfortunately, the Freedom of Information Act doesn't seem to apply in this post 9/11 America.  Agencies paid for by the taxpayers will not cough up the information for which the taxpayers pay.  We probably don't care, though.  We may not really want to know the truth.  Maybe we can't handle the truth.

You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to admit that the collapse of a 47-story building in defiance of the laws of nature deserves some serious investigation.  The federal government has some explaining to do. Why can't the information be revealed?  Why aren't ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and CNN pursuing the story of Building 7's collapse?  In a democracy (or whatever you want to call what we have), shouldn't we, the people, demand an explanation that makes some sense?  After all, what's to stop this kind of thing from happening again?

But even though we Americans have our suspicions and would like more accountability, we are busy with other things.  Like making a living.  Like home-grown Nazis.  Like immigrants.  Like tweets.  Or so the faces on television tell us.  But we don't know them.  They are just faces.  And Building 7 was just a building, a footnote to the events of that terrible day that are now just blurry memories.

It has often been said that "America lost its innocence" on that day.  Every time something tragic and suspicious happens, Americans lose their innocence.  Is there no end to the innocence that we can lose?  If we ever lose it all, we may unleash a torrent of anger that will lay waste to everything in its path. Maybe that is why we can't get answers (and why we never will).