Five Years Later-Filtering Reality?

[MrsSpringsteen]

How did you feel that day and how has it changed you? Obviously much more intense for those in NYC or Shanksville or DC, but perhaps we are all filtering reality in order to deal with the real threat of terrorism and with the memories of that day.

Maybe I'd say it's made me more realistic-less naive and more aware. But in many ways less fearful, as weird as that sounds. By that I think I mean more brave personally. When I got on a plane two months later I realized that I could have that bravery.. And more aware that things can be taken away at any time, on any day. That's something I make a conscious effort to be aware of. It's like they mention here-about trauma making you rather than breaking you.

http://health.msn.com/centers/depression/articlepage.aspx?cp-documentid=100144320

"In the aftermath of 9/11, newspaper headlines warned of post traumatic stress disorder, and the mental health community arrived in full force, ready to pick up the pieces of a torn national psyche. FEMA granted the state of New York $154.9 million “to relieve mental health problems caused or aggravated by the World Trade Center attack,” according to the organization’s Web site. Everyone stood on tiptoe, breath held, expecting to see the darkest corners of massive, community-wide mental illness."

Trauma and stress is a double-edged sword, it can make you or break you,” says Bell. “The general rule—and what we saw after 9/11—is that people are more resistant and resilient when they are vulnerable.

"This is because something like 9/11 prepares people—at least mentally prepares them—for the worst that could happen.”

The exception to the rule, then, is when trauma “breaks” those who’ve experienced it. Mental health experts have performed studies suggesting that people who suffered from pre-existing mental health problems before the attack—problems like alcoholism, drug addiction and depression—struggled more severely with these issues in the wake of 9/11.

This filtering of reality, while forestalling further symptoms of stress, may be too effective for our own good, says Smith. “The last thing you want people to do when there’s an impending risk is tune out and be inattentive. We don’t want our subway passengers to be tuning out. We don’t want our airline attendants to be inattentive.”

Today, says Smith, terrorism is a conversation piece, a subject for water cooler discussions or backyard barbeque talks. It is something that many Americans—Bob Hedges included—say they are more fascinated by than truly worried about.

“We have all the seeds of a third world war, and it’s serious. Damn serious,” says Hedges. “I think it’s only a matter of time before something else awful happens, but it certainly doesn’t do you any good to sit around and sweat about it. Think about it, yes. But stew about it and worry about it, no. Life must go on, you know?”

 

[Bono's shades]

I live in the Midwest and don't know anyone who died that day, but life certainly does feel different. I used to think what happened beyond my own little sphere didn't matter all that much as far as my daily life was concerned, but now that has completely changed.

 

[Justin24]

Well after that day I had a hatred for Muslims. I admit it. But I am sure many did at first. Then I went on my own path to uncover the real religon.

 

[nathan1977]

That day the students in my campus fellowship in CT organized a prayer meeting. Muslim students came and we prayed together. It grew all of our awareness, I think.

 

[A_Wanderer]

I think that we have seen more than enough real religion in the successive five years to make a case against it.

 

[BonosSaint]

I was out of commission for weeks after 9/11. Kind of in this weird haze. I wanted to be with those I loved almost exclusively.
My parents flew a few weeks after 9/11 and I made them call me every time they landed somewhere. I don't think I was personally afraid. The first time I had fun after that was several weeks later when I went to a hockey game and I have been grateful to hockey ever since. I slept a lot. I still sleep too much.

Although I didn't know anyone personally who died that day, I did know people whose son died. I knew when much of the aftermath died, I wanted to go to New York and I did. I used to live in the Village, so took it personally. It was painful not seeing the towers. It got less painful as time went on.

I felt closer to my country for a little while, then felt myself growing more distant as time went on and I watched how everything was unfolding. I'm not very nationalistic anymore.

I wonder how I would have handled myself if I'd been directly involved and I realized I didn't have a clue. I knew how I would liked to have behaved and wonder if I would have been capable of it.

But Mrs. S. asked how it changed me. Like her, in many ways I got braver. I wasn't about to spend the rest of my life looking for a terrorist in every corner. I began to listen to prioritize things, was less vulnerable to the manipulations going on around me. I thought smaller instead of bigger. Mortality came crashing in. I became even less religious than the barely a mustard seed I had before. I saw color instead of the black and white I was being spoonfed. I became much more observant of the reality behind all the myths. I grew more personally patient, but much more impatient in other areas of my life. There are more people I can't be bothered with. I got angrier and I'm still angry. I got sadder and I'm still sad. I look for different things than I did then, some more selfish and some less selfish. I'm blunter, but less confrontational now for the sake of confrontation. I pick my battles.

I don't think I watched the events unfold with any filters on (with the exception of what was filtered for me) and I don't think I observe much else with very many filters.

And I know what matters to me and I don't apologize for it anymore.

 

[MrsSpringsteen]

Thanks BonosSaint, that was such a lovely post


Can we please not turn this into a discussion about Muslims and how bad religion is? I was really hoping to have a more human, personal discussion. Does everything have to be combative, political, and turn into the same old repetitive arguments?

One personal thing I remember...I had a fight with my Mom (can't even remember what it was about) and one of the first things I did was to e-mail her at work and ask her if she knew what was going on.

I remember going to the park down the street that night and just sitting there and crying. The flag was lowered and I just sat there and stared at it. Just walking, the ground under my feet didn't feel secure or stable or even there.

A couple of people from my town were killed. One man died much later from injuries he sustained walking near the site of the WTC.

 

[MrsSpringsteen]

By SARA KUGLER, Associated Press WriterFri Sep 8, 1:42 PM ET

Ralph Geidel cannot remember a time when he wasn't obsessed with finding things that had been lost or discarded — forgotten marbles on the playground, old coins, false teeth and silver jewelry at the beach. And he was good at it.

This is why, on a warm, spring day, Geidel crouched on his knees on the roof of a lower Manhattan skyscraper, his face inches from a pile of gravel, looking for something precious.

Looking for traces of his brother, and others killed at the World Trade Center.

Gary Geidel was one of 11 members of an elite fire squad who died on Sept. 11, 2001. Not a granule of his remains has been identified, and nearly five years later, Ralph Geidel found himself on this roof, still searching.

He stopped suddenly, plucked a small, eggshell-colored object between his fingers and slipped his reading glasses onto his nose for a better look.

"Could be part of a vertebrae," he thought.

The piece would join a growing collection. Some 760 specks and slivers of human bones have been discovered in recent months, after demolition began on this 41-story former bank tower known as the Deutsche Bank building, just south of where the World Trade Center once stood.

Gary Geidel is not the only one who is still missing. Of the 2,749 people who were killed that day, the remains of some 1,150 have not been found.

Their families have nothing — not a sliver of a bone — left of their loved ones. And they have long since given up any hope of finding recognizable human parts.

Searchers recovered whole bodies at first — 291 victims were found intact. But as they dug into the 10-story mound of debris with rakes and machines, it was mostly just fragments.

Ralph Geidel, a retired firefighter, was among the thousands of searchers at ground zero from the start. Wearing his old FDNY coat, a photograph of his brother fastened to his firefighter helmet, Geidel checked for patterns and signals that might offer clues to hidden remains.

"You look for something that doesn't belong among that rock, the concrete, the steel, the papers and all the other stuff," he said. "You just kinda develop an eye for that, something that doesn't quite mix with everything else — certain shapes, like hands.

"I found a lot of hands."

Eventually, more than 20,000 parts were collected as the debris was excavated, sifted and carted away. Many were recovered at a second site, the former garbage dump in Staten Island where debris was hauled and combed again.

Some families, officials and experts are suing the city in federal court, alleging negligence and violation of their religious rights because the sifted leftovers — more than 1 million tons — are still at the landfill.

They believe there are human remains entombed next to New York City's trash, and are asking the court to order the removal of the debris. Mayor Michael Bloomberg contends it was adequately examined and would cost too much to relocate.

"Sift it again, or if you don't want to take the trouble, just remove and bury it elsewhere," says Diane Horning, who lost her son Matthew. "We just don't want our loved ones to be among garbage."

The search for remains was concentrated at the 16-acre World Trade Center site. But debris, human remains and jet parts also rained down on the surrounding area, and some bones turned up on nearby buildings; authorities checked nearby rooftops for pieces of humanity, but some structures were damaged and could not be inspected thoroughly.

Then, in the last year, workers preparing to tear down the Deutsche Bank building found so many new bone fragments that officials sent a group of experts, including Geidel, to comb the roof, which is covered with a layer of gravel that authorities say camouflaged many of the smaller pieces.

"Now there's this faint glimmer that perhaps we might have something," says Lynn Castrianno, whose brother, Leonard, has not been found.

"It's almost as though he existed, and then he didn't — there's no real tangible proof that he was there, and that makes a difference in the grieving process ... it's like that final goodbye has never been said."

But many aren't sure that they want to reopen that wound. It seems like so long ago that they were told the DNA in many of the remains was too degraded by time, heat and humidity to yield a match. Many stopped hoping for an identification and went ahead with memorial services — burying caskets full of memorabilia instead of bodies.

The Vigiano family had to do both. Detective Joseph Vigiano was found, but his brother John, a firefighter, was not. Twice a month and on every Sept. 11, their parents visit the incomplete gravesite of their only children.

Many families without identified remains numbly came to nightmarish conclusions: Maybe he was vaporized, scattered by the wind or reduced to flecks that were accidentally carried out of the site on a truck or a worker's boot.

"You don't want to, but your mind goes there and after a while you start to wonder, was he totally incinerated? But even then there's little pieces," says Claire Dawson, who lost her brother, Maurice Kelly.

"I'm sure there's some kind of bone fragments or something, but does it matter to me anymore? I don't know — he's gone and I don't know what help bone fragments would be."

Still, scientists are trying to identify more victims. Bode Technology Group, the Virginia company contracted to work on 9/11 remains, has developed new and encouraging processes to extract identifications from bone samples which previously came up blank.

Families and some elected officials are calling for the intervention of the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, a military forensic unit known for finding missing soldiers from long-ago wars.

But Bradley Adams, the city's chief forensic anthropologist used to work for the military unit, and he insisted that this was "the most meticulous recovery project that I've ever worked on — the size of the fragments that are being recovered is really impressive, and I have complete confidence. You couldn't do a better job."

Ralph Geidel is renowned among the searchers. In his retirement, the 48-year-old lives in Northern California, where he looks for gold in old mines and waterways. His lifelong passion for treasure hunting even landed him in South Dakota, looking for dinosaur bones.

At ground zero, he had an uncanny knack for finding remains.

"He picked things out — it was amazing — that nobody else could see," said Bill Butler, a retired firefighter who spent months in the rubble, searching for his son, Tom. "We'd go through stuff and you'd glance over it, thinking it was part of construction material or furniture or items from the building, but Ralph seemed to have a special eye for body parts and remains."

Geidel's father and younger brother, both firefighters, were also there, and the family suppressed their grief to look for Gary, the oldest of four siblings. Obsessed and tormented, Geidel imagined he heard the dead screaming.

"I'd follow the scream until I found somebody and then the screaming got less and less," he said. "The more people I found, the better I felt."

But he never found Gary.

"Who knows what's where, what's been lost?" he says. "There's a million reasons he could still be missing, and a million places he could be."

 

[BonosSaint]

Thanks BonosSaint, that was such a lovely post


Can we please not turn this into a discussion about Muslims and how bad religion is? I was really hoping to have a more human, personal discussion. Does everything have to be combative, political, and turn into the same old repetitive arguments?

One personal thing I remember...I had a fight with my Mom (can't even remember what it was about) and one of the first things I did was to e-mail her at work and ask her if she knew what was going on.

I remember going to the park down the street that night and just sitting there and crying. The flag was lowered and I just sat there and stared at it. Just walking, the ground under my feet didn't feel secure or stable or even there.

A couple of people from my town were killed. One man died much later from injuries he sustained walking near the site of the WTC.

One of the things I noticed about 9/11 was even though it was such a societal event, the personal responses to it were so individual and so hard to articulate. There was communal response, but there was also isolation.

 

[yolland]

Sad to say, I'm not sure I have any clear sense left in my memory of what the "national mood" was like before 9/11. It's a little easier to remember how I personally looked at the world and our place in it before that, but not very.

My memory of the attacks and their immediate aftermath are a jumble, and I don't know that I could pin down which thoughts I had in which order. Other than dazed disbelief at the enormity of what had happened, I'm certain my first concern was whether my mother and my younger sister, who were still living in New York at the time, were all right, followed closely by concern about other friends and acquaintances from my years living there. I remember thinking that my younger brother, who'd just begun his tour of duty with the Air Force, would likely be deployed somewhere dangerous and far away very soon (which he was), and I thought of all the times when I'd walked along the Brooklyn Heights Esplanade after school, holding his small hand on one side and my sister's still smaller hand on the other, gazing across the East River at the Lower Manhattan skyline, in which the Twin Towers figured so prominently. I remember watching expressions of solidarity for the US pour in from all over the world, side by side with an explosion of "Why do they hate us?" headlines from within, and thinking, What a heavy, heavy moment this is; I hope we can live up to its demands. I remember thinking that terrorism and militancy were going to become much more central themes in my classes whether I liked it or not. I remember attending an interfaith prayer service on campus and looking aound me at all the folks wearing hijabs and kufis and thinking that many things were going to change for my Muslim colleagues and students, and probably not for the better. I remember inviting over for Sabbath dinner a recently widowed colleague from NYC, who on top of everything else had just lost his only sibling to the attacks, and watching him break down in bewildered sobs while his two grade-school-age children stared silently at the floor. The first friend in New York I was able to get through to, a black man who was teaching in Manhattan near the WTC at the time, told me that other than the nightmarish confusion of being evacuated into the chaotic streets from his workplace and trying to figure out which direction to flee in, his strongest recollection of that day was sitting in some random bar he'd ducked into and finding himself talking for hours to some white businessman seated next to him, who'd also fled from a building near the WTC, dazedly trying to grasp together what had happened. He said it was the one and only time in his life he'd ever talked that long to a white stranger with absolutely no mutual awareness of all the usual unspoken barriers lurking in the background.

I don't recall feeling any specifically personal dread or fear related to the attacks, then or since, except perhaps when I briefly visited Pakistan in 2003 and found myself wishing that my ethnicity and nationality weren't as conspicuous as they are. I'm not afraid of flying, I didn't have any hesitation about taking the Tube when in London--you can't let yourself get into worrying about things like that. Obsessing about the possibility of fragmentary remains of your loved ones trapped in a landfill somewhere isn't healthy either, there are ghastly deposits of unclaimed human remains in so many places. I lament how this event, combined with the spiral of international events succeeding it, have irreversibly pushed the motif of a "clash of civilizations" to the forefront of seemingly everyone's worldview, subordinating so many other concerns in the process and doing it so thoroughly that I find it hard to remember quite what things felt like before. The fact of this shift in priorities--filters--I think, was inevitable and not so hard to justify....the profundity of it, and the resulting manifestations, are something else altogether. I am still hopeful, but I am much less optimistic. About my country, about lots of countries, about the fates of many people in many places. A great deal of trust--in people, processes, probabilities--was lost on our side, I think; I can't speak for other peoples. Trust can be naive and the loss of a certain amount of it isn't all bad, but it's dangerous and disorienting to lose it rapidly.

 

[MrsSpringsteen]

I Just Called to Say I Love You
The sounds of 9/11, beyond the metallic roar. by Peggy Noonan

Friday, September 8, 2006 12:01 a.m.

Everyone remembers the pictures, but I think more and more about the sounds. I always ask people what they heard that day in New York. We've all seen the film and videotape, but the sound equipment of television crews didn't always catch what people have described as the deep metallic roar.

The other night on TV there was a documentary on the Ironworkers of New York's Local 40, whose members ran to the site when the towers fell. They pitched in on rescue, then stayed for eight months to deconstruct a skyscraper some of them had helped build 35 years before. An ironworker named Jim Gaffney said, "My partner kept telling me the buildings are coming down and I'm saying 'no way.' Then we heard that noise that I will never forget. It was like a creaking and then the next thing you felt the ground rumbling."

Rudy Giuliani said it was like an earthquake. The actor Jim Caviezel saw the second plane hit the towers on television and what he heard shook him: "A weird, guttural discordant sound," he called it, a sound exactly like lightning. He knew because earlier that year he'd been hit. My son, then a teenager in a high school across the river from the towers, heard the first plane go in at 8:45 a.m. It sounded, he said, like a heavy truck going hard over a big street grate.

I think too about the sounds that came from within the buildings and within the planes--the phone calls and messages left on answering machines, all the last things said to whoever was home and picked up the phone. They awe me, those messages.

Something terrible had happened. Life was reduced to its essentials. Time was short. People said what counted, what mattered. It has been noted that there is no record of anyone calling to say, "I never liked you," or, "You hurt my feelings." No one negotiated past grievances or said, "Vote for Smith." Amazingly --or not--there is no record of anyone damning the terrorists or saying "I hate them."

No one said anything unneeded, extraneous or small. Crisis is a great editor. When you read the transcripts that have been released over the years it's all so clear.

Flight 93 flight attendant Ceecee Lyles, 33 years old, in an answering-machine message to her husband: "Please tell my children that I love them very much. I'm sorry, baby. I wish I could see your face again."

Thirty-one-year-old Melissa Harrington, a California-based trade consultant at a meeting in the towers, called her father to say she loved him. Minutes later she left a message on the answering machine as her new husband slept in their San Francisco home. "Sean, it's me, she said. "I just wanted to let you know I love you."

Capt. Walter Hynes of the New York Fire Department's Ladder 13 dialed home that morning as his rig left the firehouse at 85th Street and Lexington Avenue. He was on his way downtown, he said in his message, and things were bad. "I don't know if we'll make it out. I want to tell you that I love you and I love the kids."

Firemen don't become firemen because they're pessimists. Imagine being a guy who feels in his gut he's going to his death, and he calls on the way to say goodbye and make things clear. His widow later told the Associated Press she'd played his message hundreds of times and made copies for their kids. "He was thinking about us in those final moments."

Elizabeth Rivas saw it that way too. When her husband left for the World Trade Center that morning, she went to a laundromat, where she heard the news. She couldn't reach him by cell and rushed home. He'd called at 9:02 and reached her daughter. The child reported, "He say, mommy, he say he love you no matter what happens, he loves you." He never called again. Mrs. Rivas later said, "He tried to call me. He called me."

There was the amazing acceptance. I spoke this week with a medical doctor who told me she'd seen many people die, and many "with grace and acceptance." The people on the planes didn't have time to accept, to reflect, to think through; and yet so many showed the kind of grace you see in a hospice.

Peter Hanson, a passenger on United Airlines Flight 175 called his father. "I think they intend to go to Chicago or someplace and fly into a building," he said. "Don't worry, Dad--if it happens, it will be very fast." On the same flight, Brian Sweeney called his wife, got the answering machine, and told her they'd been hijacked. "Hopefully I'll talk to you again, but if not, have a good life. I know I'll see you again some day."

There was Tom Burnett's famous call from United Flight 93. "We're all going to die, but three of us are going to do something," he told his wife, Deena. "I love you, honey."

These were people saying, essentially, In spite of my imminent death, my thoughts are on you, and on love. I asked a psychiatrist the other day for his thoughts, and he said the people on the planes and in the towers were "accepting the inevitable" and taking care of "unfinished business." "At death's door people pass on a responsibility--'Tell Billy I never stopped loving him and forgave him long ago.' 'Take care of Mom.' 'Pray for me, Father. Pray for me, I haven't been very good.' " They address what needs doing.

This reminded me of that moment when Todd Beamer of United 93 wound up praying on the phone with a woman he'd never met before, a Verizon Airfone supervisor named Lisa Jefferson. She said later that his tone was calm. It seemed as if they were "old friends," she later wrote. They said the Lord's Prayer together. Then he said "Let's roll."

This is what I get from the last messages. People are often stronger than they know, bigger, more gallant than they'd guess. And this: We're all lucky to be here today and able to say what deserves saying, and if you say it a lot, it won't make it common and so unheard, but known and absorbed.

I think the sound of the last messages, of what was said, will live as long in human history, and contain within it as much of human history, as any old metallic roar.

 

[AchtungBono]

I feel that the 3,000 people who were murdered that day are being killed again and again and again every time some stupid ass idiot comes up with yet ANOTHER conspiracy theory about this tragedy.

The latest I've heard was:

1. The WTC planes were flown by remote-control - there were no passengers on them.
Tell THAT to the hundreds of families who will gather at the memorial to remember their loved ones - who were VERY real!

2. The cellphone conversations from United 93 were computer-generated because everyone knows that cellphones aren't allowed to be used in-flight.
Tell THAT to the family of Todd Beemer and the other heroes of that flight.

3. The WTC was brought down by a controlled demolition supervised by Silverstein (or whatever his name is.... who is JEWISH of course).

*sigh*......People actually BELIEVE this horse-shit!! (excuse my language).

It boggles the mind how stupid people can be......and how BORED.

In my opinion, all these conspiracy websites should be shut down and their owners thrown in jail.

Denying 9/11 is like denying the holocaust.

 

[BVS]

In my opinion, all these conspiracy websites should be shut down and their owners thrown in jail.

You really don't like free speech all that much do you?

 

[fly so high!]

“We have all the seeds of a third world war, and it’s serious. Damn serious,” says Hedges. “I think it’s only a matter of time before something else awful happens, but it certainly doesn’t do you any good to sit around and sweat about it. Think about it, yes. But stew about it and worry about it, no. Life must go on, you know?”

Thoughts and prayers

 

[AchtungBono]

You really don't like free speech all that much do you?

Hi BVS.....we've had this discussion many times before. I am all for freedom of speech but there HAVE to be limits!

Freedom of speech does not mean freedom to make a mockery of the worst act of terrorism in history. Nor does it mean freedom to defame the memory of the thousands who were murdered on that day.

People shouldn't be allowed to say such horrible things just because the constitution says they can.....there's such a thing as human decency and reverance for the memory of the victims.

 

[MrsSpringsteen]

Uh, what does any of that have to do with what I asked?

How did you feel that day and how has it changed you?

Can you start another thread if you need to talk about all of that stuff?

 

[AchtungBono]

Uh, what does any of that have to do with what I asked?

How did you feel that day and how has it changed you?

Can you start another thread if you need to talk about all of that stuff?

You're right Mrs. S, I'm sorry.

I'll try to simplify my feelings although it will be nearly impossible.

Watching the first tower burn was bad enough but standing in front of the TV and seeing the second plane slam into the other tower was horrifying because I realized that I had just witnessed the deaths of hundreds of people live on TV. I literally was paralyzed and I was shaking like a leaf.

I immediately phoned my two friends in NYC and asked if they were ok. They had no idea what I was talking about and we kind of laughed that I was 15,000 miles away in Israel telling them what was going on in their own back yard.....but soon the laughing stopped.

I kept my eyes glued to CNN (FOX news wasn't available in Israel yet) and watched Aaron Brown give the most chilling commentary from the rooftop overlooking the two towers.

Then the reports came about the planes at the Pentagon and Pennsylvania and that the white house was being evacuated. At that second I turned to my colleague and said: "that's it...we're witnessing the start of world war III....".

Then came the moment that is burned in my brain forever.....the collapse of the first tower - my mouth dropped and I started palpitating and hyperventilating. I started crying hysterically and couldn't calm down.

When the second tower came down I screamed. My boss got up from his chair and closed the TV......which was the proper thing to do.

Needless to say, I couldn't function that day. I kept looking at the blank TV screen and I sat at my desk numb with pain.....and ANGER.

I saved the newspaper from that day and I look at it every once in a while....not to remind me of the evil in the world, but to remind me of the heroes of that day - the firefighters and policemen, the people of NYC and Mayor Guilianni, the brave passengers of United 93 and Donald Rumsfeld (among others) helping to evacuate the wounded from the Pentagon.

It was a day of extraordinary cruelty that turned into a day of bravery, patriotism and triumph of the spirit - New Yorkers didn't break, they mobilized to help their fellow citizens in trouble and comfort those who have lost loved ones in the towers, as did the citizens of Washingto DC and Shanksville, PA.

The symbol of this day for me is the sight of the Liberty torch lifted high against the black smokey background of the collapsed towers. This to me represents the eventual triumph of good over evil, and it strengthens my belief that liberty and democracy will always win over tyranny.

My thoughts are with the American people today, people who I don't know but feel a bonding with. People who went to bed Monday night Sept.10th in one world and woke up Tuesday morning in a different one........

G-d bless America and may the brave souls of 9/11 rest in peace in the eternal blessed light of G-d's grace.

 

[yolland]

A somewhat broader and more political take on the question, but still adressing the same basic theme...

I edited this down quite a bit.

Five years after 9/11: a shifted view of the world

By Peter Grier and Mark Rice-Oxley
Christian Science Monitor, September 11 2006

The world today is a very different place from the way it was on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. In one sense that statement is obvious. Five years is a long time in geopolitics. The world turns, whatever terrorists do. But half a decade on, it also seems clear that Al Qaeda's attacks and the US response have helped move the metaphorical tectonic plates of the globe. Besides direct effects, such as the toppling of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the reverberations from 9/11 may include a new general organizing principle for international affairs.

The Cold War was about the Western and communist blocs, and their values, conflicts, and internal cracks. The current period is about the US and the Islamic world--their mutual suspicions and occasional cooperation, and the wedge Al Qaeda has tried to drive between them.

Some experts claim that Sept. 11 was a day in which not much changed in regards to the interrelations of the nations and cultures of the world. Globalization today continues unabated. The world economy hasn't collapsed. Immigrants, legal and otherwise, continue to flock into the US. On the morning of Sept. 11, the Washington Post carried a page 1 story: "Israeli Tanks Encircle a City in West Bank." That day's New York Times had an inside piece on "Iran Denial on Nuclear Weapons." Such headlines "suggest that our pre-9/11 preoccupations are certainly not that different from those we carry today," writes William Dobson, managing editor of Foreign Policy, in the current issue.

True, anti-Americanism is on the rise. Radical Islamists have declared holy war on the US, its Western allies, and Saudi Arabia and other long-standing Arab regimes. But these trends date from the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the rise of the US as a global hegemon, states Mr. Dobson. The shock of Sept. 11 simply made Americans aware of what the world was already like.

Others say that the strikes made Americans feel their vulnerability--and that such a shift in self-image is itself a profound change. Absent 9/11, the US would have been highly unlikely to invade Afghanistan. Absent Afghanistan, the Bush administration might have faced insuperable military and political problems with regard to the subsequent invasion of Iraq.

Much of the hostility that some Islamists bear toward the US "is driven by one of the most powerful of human emotions, a sense of indignity and humiliation," says Lawrence Harrison, an adjunct lecturer in international relations at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Medford, Mass. "That's a quite new foreign-policy problem."

Trust in the US has also eroded substantially since 9/11, according to Ivo Daalder, a senior fellow in foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution, among friends as well as adversaries. International cooperation on a wide range of problems, from counter-proliferation to global warming, is thus "increasingly absent," he claims. But international cooperation played a large role in last month's arrests in England of suspects charged with planning to destroy transatlantic aircraft. And other experts say Europe is increasingly aware that it may be the terrorists' new focus.

Part of Europe's problem, as ever, is its patchwork nature. Some countries, particularly those with troops in Iraq or Afghanistan, feel more exposed than others, and hence feel greater urgency to act. Britain, the Netherlands, and Denmark, which arrested a suspected terror cell last week, feel they are among the most vulnerable. Finland and Slovenia may feel relatively immune by contrast. Another problem is the differing legal and judicial systems in the different countries. Some have muscular laws for detaining suspects; others do not. Some have brought in robust, even authoritarian antiterror laws; others have not. Some have tolerated firebrand clerics spouting hate in mosques; others have taken a dim view of such antics, and have deported the culprits.

While Europe may have become a target and center of operations for terrorist cells, the US and Islam are the two poles around which 21st-century geopolitics may increasingly revolve. This does not necessarily mean that the world is enduring a "clash of civilizations," as defined by Harvard professor Samuel Huntington's 1996 book of that name. Dr. Huntington himself has said that hasn't happened; and that Islam and the West now simply have many issues between them, with some handled more successfully than others.

The events of 9/11 have opened the world's eyes to a new conflict, driven by mutual hurt, fear, and suspicion. "The conflict is not a battle between, but rather a battle within. It is not two blocs locked in battle ... but about a new global construct of mutual insecurity that has emerged," writes Peter Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, in his analysis of the events of 9/11 five years on.

 

[najeena]

I was as horrified as anyone else, it was a terrible day. I felt a little better when the rest of the world joined in our grief and anger. Then the war drums started, and my husband said "Watch, Bush will invent a bullshit reason to take this into Iraq". I couldn't believe that the president of the United States would do something so cynical and manipulative. Of course, time has proved that he and his handlers are capable of that and much worse.

What a pointless, tragic waste... that's the best thing I can say about our president and what he has accomplished.

 

[sue4u2]

How has it changed me? With all that is said and done, I could give my life to save you. Any of You!!
The people of Flight 93...changed me more than I can even explain.

 

[A_Wanderer]

An admission

We have no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the September 11th" attacks," Bush said in a brief encounter with reporters after a meeting with members of Congress. Bush added, "There's no question that Saddam Hussein had al-Qaeda ties."

The president's remark followed a comment Tuesday by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who said he saw no evidence that Saddam was involved in the attacks. "I've not seen any indication that would lead me to believe that I could say that," Rumsfeld said.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2003-09-17-bush-saddam_x.htm

 

[Ellay]

Even five years on, If I'm watching a movie, and I glimpse the twin towers in the background, it still makes me catch my breath.

It's as if what happened was the dividing line between old world / new world.