Sunday Discussion Group

September 10, 2006

With the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks coming tomorrow, it seems appropriate to ask: was it really the day that “changed everything”?

In October 2003, Condoleezza Rice said, “No less than December 7, 1941, September 11, 2001, forever changed the lives of every American.” And yet, five years after the most horrific day in a generation, identifying exactly what’s changed isn’t easy.

The Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne Jr. had a poignant piece a couple of days ago about what he sees, looking back over the last five years.

The events of Sept. 11, 2001, are personal to every American. The day was not about politics or partisanship or elections. That’s why the country, divided more or less 50-50 on political matters the day before the terrorist attacks, immediately drew together in sorrow, solidarity and determination. The rest of the world stood with us.

Five years later, you look at the rancid state of our politics, the decline in America’s standing in the world and the behavior of our national leadership, and you want to shed tears for your nation.

Indeed, a year ago, The New Republic’s Lawrence Kaplan explained that, among other things, 9/11 did not have a significant effect on military recruitment, rates of community service or volunteer work, charitable donations, attendance at houses of worship, or interest in the news (foreign or domestic). One has to assume this observation is probably equally true now.

So, what has changed over the last five years? How are our lives different? How are our politics and leaders different?

And, if the permanent societal changes we expected in the immediate aftermath of the attacks failed to take root, why didn’t 9/11 change everything?

It did change everything. We have come together only in the sense that we are “one nation — under surveillance”. I don’t think the terrorists knew that the towers would collapse and that the significance of their act would be so huge. The other significance of their act was somewhat unexpected as well. Because it happened on George Bush’s watch it unleashed something ugly in the American body politic. It was like our country was injecting steroids. We started flexing our muscles and then got crazy.

In some sense the terrorists won. The idea that the bombing was 10% impact and 90% echo seems true to me. Often the aftershocks are worse than the earthquake.

  • There will NEVER be another September 11.

    By this I mean that we will never have a commercial jet fly into a building.

    Prior to 9-11, the proper way to deal with a hijck was to do what they said and get the plane on the ground and let the professionals negotiate with them.

    Now, there is no way a pilot will give up control. They will depressurize the cabin which will disable anyone not near the oxygen . They will put the plane into a controlled dive where anyone not strapped into their seat belts will hit the ceiling. And, if need be, the pilot will put the plane on the ground themselves to keep the plane away from the hijackers. The hijackers might be able to force the plane to crash or blow up the plane but a plane will never again be used as a missile.

    I know people who worked in the World Trade Center. I see the empty sky that was blocked by the buildings on a regular basis. I often still cry when I see buildings that I have never seen before because the Trade Center should be blocking my view.

    So, what has changed?

    I think we have spent far too much time solving the wrong problem. I think it will be years before we really understand how we really need to respond.

    For example, why are people afraid to work in the new Freedom Tower but people are still working in the Sears Tower and the Empire State Building?

    I don’t have any answers but it pains me to realize that we are reacting to 9-11 in illogical ways.

  • On 9/12 the country was united as it had never been before, except possibly V-E Day. Republicans and Democrats embraced and offered George Bush their combined loyalty (90% polls) and resolve to overcome the disaster. The “hole in the ground” would be quickly filled with a suitable monumental building or buildings. The whole world, through its newspapers, claimed to be American on that day.

    From the get-go Bush bungled and mangled all those magnificent opportunities to turn disaster into something we could have been proud of. San Francisco immediately rebuilt after the 1906 disaster, inspired by nothing more than their faith in the future. Not so this Admiinistration. Right away this spoiled scion of a rotten family said that no sacrifices would be asked of us — has anything worthwhile ever happened without sacrifice? Right away this selfish bastard saw what the “Plan for a New American Century” had called years earlier a sort of modern Pearl Harbor — the opportunity to invade a country which was doing us no harm and thereby settle an Oedipal conflict with his wimp-factor father. Right away that slime-bag Karl Rove began planning his political campaigns based on further hate and nothing to hope for but fear itself. And right away the Administration began relentlessly calling for massive tax cuts on behalf of their obscenely rich friends.

    Yes, the country has changed. Politics has become religion, with all its divisive sectarianism and attendant hatreds of the impure and impious, the heretical and non-religious. The uniter has divided us more emotionally than at any time since the Civil War. The decider has rejected all Democratic suggestions for improving things, excluding them even from reading bills passed in the middle of the night, supposedly in our name. The defender of our Constitution has violated it on 750 occasions.

    Yes, the country has changed. Hopefully this November it will begin to change back, to move forward. Then, either through impeachment or simply keeping the Shrub and his cronies inactive at the cattle-less “ranch” in Crawford and whatever hole Cheney infests, we’ll at least be rid of the whole worthless wriggling pile of slime. Rid of, that is, until the historians get their knives out and begin the deliciously juicy task our journalists have so far failed to do.

  • Yeah, it’s definitely a new era. I think what happened was, pretty quickly in the aftermath of 9/11, every racist asshole in this country said to himself/herself, “See! I was right all along!” and so they’re more coordinated and energized than they have been in a very long time– the very worst element of conservatives in this country.

    It parallels what the more brainy among the democrats call “anti-intellectualism” or whatever, too. If the people you need to motivate to do your bidding are assholes, then you need to make them think that your enemies represent some kind of threat to assholism in general. So that’s why this rhetoric of the right wing focuses on this extreme neurotic bullshit now- and sounds like an alarm about your ability to be mediocre, to be an ignorant douche-bag, to be harmfully parochial, etc., is being threatened.

    I remember the first couple of weeks after 9/11. My god, I’ve never felt so much like a member of the human race in my life. It was everywhere. Now, tthat’s all gone. The worst among us started undermining it from day one.

  • By noon, U.S. Central Time zone, on 11 Sep 01, I had come to the realization that the do-nothing Bush administration had a re-election theme.

    Yeah, I was correct. But how small and limited my thinking was, is almost embarrassing.

  • it totally changed everything for me. i went from being a NYC special ed. teacher w/a huge range of interests to a nervous fucking wreck totally obsessed w/reading news online.

    no, wait, that was almost a year before, w/the SCOTUS debacle. 9/11 changed nothing apart from exposing bu$hCo’s ‘uniter not divider’ bullshit and fucking US and Iraq et al., in the ass.

  • 9/11/01 was the day Dick Cheney decided how he was going to shred the Bill of Rights. He told Boy George II to tell America that we were attacked because the Terrorists “Hate America’s Freedoms” and ever since the Bushites have been doing everything they can to dismantle those freedoms (1st, 4th, etc.) so the Terrorists won’t hate us anymore.

    That is their long range plan.

  • When the world united with us 9/11, I never could have imagined how politically divided we would eventually become. It certainly has made me more involved in politics.

    Politics has become religion. Your comments are great Ed (as usual). How are Karen & Lulu? I miss your lovely neighborhood.

  • Bush turned a terrorist attack on our country into a political device the Republican party could exploit for years to come. His legacy will be bad enough considering what he did to Iraq, but the crass machinations of his corrupt and calculating cronies has weakened the United States to an incredible degree.

    The Bush administration has harmed America as a democracy and ruined the posibility that America could be a positive actor on the global stage. He has broken the law, failed to protect and defend our constitution, and stood by as thousands of our soldiers have died for no reason other than to avenge his daddy and satisfy the PNAC thugs propping him up. Bush has done exactly what Osama bin Laden wanted him to do.

    Ed Stephen: Politics has become religion, with all its divisive sectarianism and attendant hatreds of the impure and impious, the heretical and non-religious.

    Yes, this just shows what Bush thinks of this country. To him, it’s not “we the people,” it’s “we the Republican power brokers and captains of industry.” I wonder if the man even has a conscience.

  • “9/11 changed everything,” is an empty vessel which a person can fill with whatever they choose. As such I dismiss it as meaningless gibberish.

  • 9/11 changed nothing, in that the same cynical political animals were in power before and after the tragedy. As a result, they — more than the terrorists — changed the character of the United States.
    Like others, I still remember the sympathy of the entire world, including Iran, that day. That day, with its sincere international response, was an opportunity amid the sorrow. The Office of the President could have used that goodwill to ease existing world tensions and develop a consensus among nations to isolate the terrorists as world enemies and to identify the root causes of their actions.
    I recall Wes Clark saying that we needed not only to destroy the terrorists, but to discredit them. Unfortunately our president was George Bush, whose subsequent actions gave the terrorist more power and reach.
    Tightened security was required, but the intentional subversion of civil rights and the Constitution were unnecessary. Using 9/11 for Republican political gain has been shameful, but it has worked. Like all despots, the administration used fear, rather than determined optimism to control, rather than lead the nation.
    Terrorists have always been a threat. 9/11 was only different from the Oklahoma City bombing in scale. The tragedy of 9/11 was compounded by our own government.
    Will things change? Will we recover from the physical and self-inflicted political devastation? Once on the books, laws are very difficult to rescind. But I have confidence that a new, principled administration — even a Republican one — can reverse much of the damage, especially to our world prestige and trust. Sane behavior is the antidote to presidential malpractice.

  • steve_e: I wonder if the man even has a conscience.

    if he saw it on a page he was trying to read, i can see him all ‘Con-Science? hey, ah lahk that!’

  • 9/11 did change everything.

    I’m paying waaaaay less in taxes.

    And that, to me, is everything.

  • 9/11 did change everything. Had it not occurred, had we foiled the plan, Bush would not have had a second term. We would not be in Iraq or even Afghanistan. Gore or Kerry would probably be president, undoing the damage of the Bush administration, including reversing the obscene tax cuts on the wealthy, moving environmentalism ahead, taking global warming and alternative energy seriously (they must go together), making progress on universal health care. Terrorism would not be the bogeyman that it is today, dominating the political, economic and social landscape in America. I can go on and on and on, but it gets me so riled up how this single event, in a way no one imagined on 9/12, has set this nation back at least a decade, if not irreversibly.

    Do we begin to dig ourselves out of this mess in November?
    Even if the Democrats win, I’m not so sure they’re the same party that they were before 9/11. I don’t hear anything from them that gives me confidence in the future. The Republican neocon machine has been so dominant, so overwhelming, so loud and arrogant and swaggering, and the Democrats so meek and cowering and listless, so lacking in vision and leadership, so willing, apparently, to abandon all their progressive ideals just to hang on to their diminished minority role.

    It’s very, very discouraging.

  • I’m thinking this story of all the world united with us after 9/11 has become myth. No one’s agendas had changed in the world. It was mostly an illusion of support. Even without Bush’s disastrous foreign policy things would have returned to normal fairly soon after 9/11.

    Probably the one big opportunity was in a lowering fuel consumption and speeding up the adoption of alternate methods. Which of course didn’t happen.

    Like someone said, if it weren’t called 9/11, most people wouldn’t remember what day it happened.

  • One of my favorite “lessons” of 9/11 was Time’s statement that irony was dead. Even at the time this struck me as ridiculous. Yeah, The Daily Show and the rest of late night comedy took a few weeks off. But it was a break, not cancellation.

    John McLaughlin just said, as I typed this, “Fear always trumps hope.” I think that may be the only real change. We’ve become more paranoid. It’s the reason Democrats need to be more agressive on the national security debate than we used to. We must overcome Republican fearmongering that is so much more effective now than it was before.

  • “9/11 did not have a significant effect on military recruitment, rates of community service or volunteer work, charitable donations, attendance at houses of worship, or interest in the news (foreign or domestic). One has to assume this observation is probably equally true now.”

    One more reason the Pearl Harbor/Sept. 11, 2001 analogy is so inappropriate. Where are the Victory Gardens? Where are the posters asking “Is this trip really necessary?” How about some sort of government initiative where everyone gives up SOMETHING so every soldier can have body armor? Nah. Pay no attention to those flag draped coffins and get on with your lives. We’ll watch.

    Again this reveals the minds of those in power. They don’t want us to think about the war in Iraq because that reveals what incompetent boobs they are. They do want us to think about their latest trumped-up reason for the war in Iraq: Brown heathens after our blood. If they could, they’d direct our attention to the war in Afghanistan, which made sense even to this liberal. However, it’s getting harder and harder to say the Taliban is out of business. And there’s the fact Osama bin Laden is still alive (and possibly in Pakistan) because they completely screwed the soldiers at Tora Bora.

    Yes, it changed the world, because it didn’t change that smug, clueless meat puppet. You know how they say Comes the hour, comes the man?

    He aint’ come yet.

  • The failure to count the votes in Florida changed everything.

    That was the moment true terrorists gained complete control of this country.

    Since then… they have never looked back.

  • Let’s just take a look at the things 9/11 changed, shall we??

    Before 9/11 the GOP was determined to enact tax cuts that would balloon the deficit. After 9/11, the GOP was determined to enact tax cuts that would balloon the deficit.

    Before 9/11, the Bush Administration was looking for a way to attack Iraq. After 9/11, the Bush administration found a way to attack Iraq.

    Before 9/11, the Bush administration didn’t consider bin Laden a credible threat. After 9/11, Bush said of bin Laden, “I don’t think about him that much.”

    Before 9/11, the Right thought it was more important to go after Bill Clinton than to go after al Qaeda. After 9/11, as we’ve seen this week, the Right thinks it is more important to go Bill Clinton than to go after al Qaeda.

    So I think this a reasonable conclusion, based on a preponderance of evidence: 9/11 changed nothing.

  • The Pearl Harbor analogy is as mistaken as all the rest of the Bush (Rice) WW2 analogies. Al queda’s attack was basically a “raid,” albeit a dramatic one. There was and is no Wehrmacht or Imperial army prepared to follow up. The act should have been treated as a raid by a group of fanatics. Had it been, we would be far safer.

  • Ed (#3), Swan (#4) and Alibubba (#21) have got it right as rain. That’s not to say everyone else hasn’t provided excellent, thoughtful insight, but those three are the gold standard here right now as regards cutting through to the bone of the issue.

    To me, 9/11 would have changed everything, had a cabal of narrow-minded, incompetent partisans not been in office, who saw the event entirely as a great way to “get over” on America and accomplish things they knew they couldn’t do otherwise. Unfortunately, they’ve done a good job since.

  • Bill Clinton, on Republican efforts to make national security the top campaign issue:

    “They’ve trotted that dog out for the last three elections – and it’s got mange all over it.”

  • As far as the broader picture is concerned Ed, steve_e and Alibubba (#11) say it for me. On a more personal level, 9/11 changed things dramatically for me because I live and work in Manhattan and have a child in elementary school here. I saw the towers burning from midtown on 5th avenue and know people who died there. Every year now, those horrible pictures are resurrected and we’re all supposed to relive the event in the mistaken view that “we should never forget.” People here will never forget anyway and will never feel safe again. We’re supposed to have emergency plans for every member of the family in the likely event that we’re not together when the next attack happens. It’s telling that Bush’s support is the lowest anywhere right here in New York City.

  • Just another blip on the radar compared with all the mega issues — the world’s growing dependence on oil and coal, greater concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere, growing population of man, increasing concentration of man in mega cities, AIDS, the threat of pandemics (bird flu), further decline of ecosystems including rain forests and coral reefs, species extinctions, proliferation of nuclear materials, the buildup of greater debt in the US, increasing unsustainability of social security and medicare, broken pension systems, broken health care systems, increasing disparity between the classes, broken and corrupt democracies, etc. etc.

    So, yes, things have changed — they are getting worse, big time worse.

  • More proof nothing’s changed:

    GOP’s strategy for November revealed: http://tinyurl.com/rd4ql

    Yep, because when our soldiers are getting chewed to pieces and the people who they’ve been sent to “rescue” from a despot are being splattered all over the pavement; When the economy is in need of a defribillator; When people are wondering how the hell they’re going to pay their winter heating bills and eat at least once a week; When a major city is still a mess a year after a major disaster (the one that’s anniversary got far less attention from the Admin.) and thousands of people are still without homes; When an already strained education system is being bludgeoned to death by the No Child Left With A Mind initiative; When health care costs are shooting upward at an alarming rate; When all is darkest and dreariest, people don’t want to hear solutions. They don’t want to hear what any one is going to do about it. Nope, they really want to hear dirt about the other guy. Nothing like gossip to make the proles forget all about their sorry, miserable, debt, riddled lives.

    And will “The Uniter,” step in and say, “Hey guys, we’re in the middle of a war, bad guys are out to get us. Why don’t you play nice for once.”?

    Sure. Right after Ric Santorum and Fred Phelps do the nasty on the steps of the Capitol.

    How can things change when the leader doesn’t care?

  • 9-11 had an Amazing Grace moment, (hauntingly played on bagpipes).. with the opportunity to touch the soul of America for a rebirth of our national vision.

    Instead we have the foul “Path to 9-11” brewed by the right wing axis of evil (corporations, neocons, and evangelicals).

    It all reminds me of Jimmy Stewart’s choice between two alternate realities in the movie, A Wonderful Life and
    9-11 was the moment when entered Potterville.
    Where is our angel with the silver bell when we need him?

  • Koryel is right.

    In the long run, historians at least will maintain that 12/12/2000 was a far greater blow to the Republic than 9/11

  • Why couldn’t 9/11 change this lousy administration? Why should an incompetent bunch with lots of warnings who let such a thing happen on their watch be able to use it to show how well they protect us? This is up-is-downism on a ridiculous scale. And people buy it by the shovelful. Pathetic!

  • Much as I feel the loss of that day, the 2000 after-election spectacle had a much greater effect on the way I look at the world. It’s one thing to have stronger evidence that there are people who don’t like Americans. It’s another to begin to question whether you like Americans, yourself.

  • What has changed since 09/11 is the accelerated reduction in the manufacturing base of the USA, and the resulting explosion of our combined debts, and the devaluation of our currency. 09/11 gave the Republicans the circus they needed confuse the public into supporting the give away of three trillion federal dollars through tax cuts for the mega-rich, and through tax breaks for companies which abandon our soil. “I don’t want to abolish government,” Norquist told National Public Radio’s Mara Liasson in a May 25, 2001 Morning Edition interview. “I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” You need spectacular obscufation to achieve the goal of bringing the greatest nation in the world to its knees. “The global war against terrorism” was the mantra used to keep the embarrassingly overworked and underpaid American populace from realizing that they are wittnessing the end of America as a great nation. I only wonder what form of governance we’ll have in a few decades. I presume that I will easily live to see the breakup of our nation. We will owe this impending debacle to the nation’s obsession with boogeymen and gods. We are externalizing our improperly supressed insecurities by living for today on all too easy borrowed funds. Just wait for the real estate market to correct, and then for the Ogallala to substantively drain. Reality’s a bitch; let’s just live in fantasy until we’re dead in the tub.

  • It’s time to admit that Osama won.

    He provoked the bedwetters of the Republican right to a massive over-reaction that has brought a new life to jihadists while crippling the United States. Of course the biggest winner has been Iran, whose crafty leaders pantsed the Bush cronies.

    I am frightened that we may never be able to recover – not from 9/11, but from the disasters that the jingoists have wrought on our freedoms, our economy, our military, and our position in the world.

  • 2000 was the big change / when the election was placed in the hands of the supreme court / we gave up our democracy then and allowed criminals to begin shreddding the bill of rights and the constitution

    911 and my memories of food shortages in ww2 got me to can everything in my garden and plant 400 flowering bulbs

    i dont have a lot of hope for our republic, to tell the truth, and when the trade center was hit i thought, i am glad i am old / i wont have to hang around much longer to see the true devestation the bush predidency is going to do

  • in and of itself, sept 11, 2001 had little long-term significance to the u.s. it was a harsh reality that cost just under 3000 people their lives.

    it’s lasting significance includes the following:

    — it provided the rationale and justification for a ruthless, power-grabbing presidency the likes of which we have rarely experienced before in our history, maybe never before.

    — an airplane attack on two very tall buildings in new york city, also provided a movie-like (poseidon adventure”, et al) script which was a perfect subject for the type of meretricious television news reporting had been developing since the mid 1980’s.

    — the hollywood-like script allowed television newscasters and politicians act out parts in this “movie” for months and then for years.

    personally, i learned how easily television can corrupt the ancient notion of a “hero”;

    can cheapen it by constant repetition and and attribution to people who were in no way heroes, e.g., mayor guliannni.

  • I’m Over It .

    I will be really glad when this 9/11 national holiday has passed. I am at the point where I immediately grab the remote when a related story is introduced. How long will it be until we start having 9/11 sales at a store near you?

    3,000 people died.

    I wish we were as obsessive about the 43,000 deaths caused by traffic accidents (non alcohol related), the 85,000 deaths related to alcohol use, the 435,000 deaths caused by tobacco use, the 29,000 killed by guns. (Multiply each of these numbers by 5 to compare with the 5 year total of deaths by terrorism.)

    How about the fact that twice as many black babies die than do white ones.

    A whole bunch of people die premature and preventable deaths. Let’s act as if we care about them all.

  • Hard for me to add much to the great overview of the topic in all of the comments.

    My own take is how 9/11 ripped the facade off of the idea that democracy is somehow a force in it’s own right. The concept of people governing themselves with fairness and mutual consideration is only as valid as the desire of the citizens to live in a considerate and mutually supportive way. The word, democracy, itself might linger because of nostalgia and because of it’s usefulness as a propaganda lever. But the humans at the center of ShrubCo/RepubCo have no use for democracy and 9/11 gave them a crowbar to significantly further dismantle a most inconvenient political system. In the name of saving and spreading democracy of course.

    The 2000 election was a bigger disaster for democracy but 9/11 was a better symbolic hammer to keep beating the country with. I heard the idea of making 9/11 an ongoing “holiday” of national mourning discussed on NPR this morning. That will be the equivilant of Lenin’s Tomb. An embalmed event that will be resurrected annually with the opportunity for cross merchandising and political propagandizing.

    9/11 ripped open a vulnerable artery. Whether or not we will bleed to death remains to be seen. But our vibrant colors of red, white and blue are fading.

  • 9/11 changed nothing.

    Only opportunitistic Republicans changed it into their dirty dity

    of lies and evil.

    .

  • btw, i’m watching ‘path to 9/11’ now, for the last 90 min. well, it’s been on that long but i tuned out after the first 20 min.

    booooor-ing! *in a Homer Simpson voice*

  • In the long run, historians at least will maintain that 12/12/2000 was a far greater blow to the Republic than 9/11

    Of course — we wouldn’t have had the one without the other.

  • The term, Sheeple, took on real meaning after 9-11, and the sheep herders in the White House have thus far succeeded in moving them along by maintaining a high level of fear, PRN. If, or when, the public ever wakes up, it will be in a location far from any green pasture.

  • Let’s make 9/11/06 another turning point..
    The day when the Republican lie machine was overstreched with one blatant lie too many…… and began to tumble…… This could be a day when the sheeple began to awaken from their hypnotic spell , because enough was finally enough.

  • ***…forever changed the lives of every American.”***

    Ummmm…no, Condi—it didn’t.

    My life didn’t change in the past five years one iota. I didn’t waste huge sums of time, effort, and energy trying to find out how “nine-eleven” changed my life, either. I still grow a fair portion of my family’s food at home; I did that before “nine-eleven” as well. I always avoided flying, because the view is so much more enjoyable when traveling by car, or by train, or by boat—just as it was before “nine-eleven.” Gas is more expensive, but when inflationary principles are applied, it was more expensive—and harder to get—during the oil embargo than it is now. “Nine-eleven” hasn’t affected my family’s travel plans so much as once in these past five years.

    Some people say to me, “But you’ll never visit the World Trade Center!” So what? It was a butt-ugly building to begin with—as is anything built on the “exo-skeleton” concept of architecture.

    They say, “Think of all the people that died!” More children die on this planet from hunger-related illnesses in two hours than all the people who died on “nine-eleven.” I don’t see Herr Bush, or Cheney, or Rice saying anything about those kids.

    They say “You’re not supporting the troops!” As with Viet Nam, ordering a man into his uniform and sending him to fight a war without the tools, support, reserve manpower, and strategy to win—THAT is “not supporting the troops.” “Nine-eleven” didn’t change that, either.

    They apply the term, “cut-and-run.” Refusing to say “no” to someone when they’re as wrong as the inept, infantile, egotistical sub-simian currently occupying the White House out of a fanatical loyalty that is no more than a sub-psychotic fear of exclusion on the part of the GOP hierarchy is nothing less than Cowardice of the basest level—just as it was before “nine-eleven.”

    I refer to the event by spelling it out—“nine-eleven”—because to me, it’s nothing more than a convenience-store concept, applied by this administration to get people to waste more of their money on things they don’t really need—and thus, to have nothing left to spend on the things that are real necessities in their lives—and I outgrew the need to buy “slurpees” a long time ago. Frozen water, food coloring, and sugar is not a thing of substance—just as Herr Bush and his maniacal pandering of “nine-eleven” is not a thing of substance, when he only uses it to his own greed-based ends….

  • My high school age son was reading the sports section of the newspaper two days after major league baseball resumed after the attack. He noted that at one game the night before a player from the non-home team was booed (just for showing up– I wish I remembered who was playing). My son said: “I guess we’re back to normal again”. Smart kid. But it is sad. I think we didn’t change because few of us lost anyone we knew (I only knew one) and it became as easy to forget the significance of the event as it was to forget those who died. It has proven easy to forget Katrina victims, tsunami victims (“oh yes and when was that”?)- and the fact that people made decisions to save money and have bad levees and no warning system for any beach dwellers except in some of the fanciest resorts.

  • For me personally nothing’s changed, or not greatly.

    I do remember the day, because the first I heard of the attack (we don’t watch TV or listen to the radio in the mornings) was a phone call from my stepson to reassure us he was OK (he used to work nearby, though not in either of the Towers themselves). Once I knew that, all I could think of were odd, disconnected things:
    “this is going to get Bush’s ratings up, if he plays it right” (you may remember that they’d remained uncommonly low — for the first-termer — after the “selection”)
    “how clever of whoever, to get it that concerted; the last time I heard of a similiarly unexpected and well-organized action was the imposition of the military law on Poland, Dec 13, 1981”
    “Is there any significance about the date (numbers)? Isn’t 911 what one’s supposed to call in an emergency?”

    After that… The dollar tanked vis euro (and never recovered), which is only marginally important — I used to buy books (mail-order) in Europe, subscribe to a couple of magazines, and visit Poland every couple of years. Now I limit my pleasures, but have not eliminated them entirely. That’s not enough of a sacrifice to even feel vindicated about having been right (nobody believed me when I said the dollar tanking was *not* going to do us much good. Our goods being cheap meant squat, if few people wanted them. OTOH, we always want lots of stuff from abroad)

    I never drove much and my car is reasonably fuel-efficient, so the climbing gas prices didn’t register all that much. I learnt to use the car more efficienly, that’s all.

    I’ve watched the govt’s antics with equal measure of exasperation and sadness, but with little surprise; I knew, from my years in (commie) Poland, that big-time Capitalism had a rotten core and that Big Brother was always watching you, ready to pull you in and your fingernails out.

    The more things change, the more they remain the same, no?

    OT. I’ve been cruising political blogs tonight and one of them recommended the following:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpK9LNyht14

    Couldn’t have picked a more appropriate night to counteract the showing of the Twisted Path of Lies…

  • Domestically, nothing changed, though it could have. The right-wing partisan machine unleashed during the impeachment saga, revved up during the Florida re-count, went into overdrive, and the country is the worse for it. But if it wasn’t 9/11, they would have found something else – immigration, Iraq (already in the works), etc

    Internationally, everything changed, though it didn’t have to. Before 9/11, the US was at the head of a global coalition that favored free markets, elections, negotiated solutions to disputes, international law. Everyone was more or less a member, except a few “rogue states” (Serbia, Iraq, Iran, N Korea). Russia and China sometimes tried to make trouble, but knew they were isolated. No, really – it’s hard to remember, but I was there, and that’s that’s how it was.

    Now the US has only a tiny number of true allies – the UK, Israel, maybe Australia. Everyone else is either conditionally willing to help, if it serves their interests & isn’t too much of a burden (Germany, Japan …), determinedly neutral (France, Canada …), uncooperative (Russia, China, Egypt, Saudis …) or outright hostile (Syria, Iran, Venezuela …).

    On 9/12, of course, everyone wanted to be on our side. Now they almost all hate us. Brilliant move, guys.

  • I think it changed for some but not for others. The closer geographically you are or if you knew someone who died (or even escaped yourself) then I think things changed drastically. For others, I don’t know – it may depend on the person. As a whole, I don’t know that society did.

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