In a week it will all be over: the wall-to-wall TV coverage and special commemorative issues, the memorial concerts and 5K runs, the laying of wreaths, the playing of taps, and the endless conversations about how the world has “changed since 9/11”, if indeed it really did.

Of course it has. True, the juggernaut of terror that ripped a hole in America’s heart has settled into something quieter, if not completely invisible, over the course of a decade. But the visceral fear awakened that day is still there as a low-level anxiety, gnawing in the pits of a million stomachs. How else to explain that just this week, an acquaintance looked up into the crystalline blue of a perfect September morning and remarked, with no apparent irony, “Doesn’t this remind you of 9/11?” How else to explain the panic over an unattended bag at the airport where I left my son three days ago as he headed back to school – the police and the crime tape, the bomb-sniffing dogs and robotic sensor? What is it when a whole subway line can be brought to a halt over an abandoned plastic container of strange pink liquid that turns out to be nothing more than grapefruit juice (this happened in New York City two summers ago)?

Of course the world has changed. Bin Laden is dead. Qaddafi’s been toppled. Afghanistan, as promised, was bombed back to the Stone Age. To some, these are real victories. To others, they have a hollow ring against the background murmur of endless overseas wars. True, there may have been no seismic shifts in popular culture or any other aspects of public life. The old bravado is back (if it ever went away), and the only dust swirling around Ground Zero these days is being kicked up by new cranes and new construction crews. After years of real-estate wrangling and political controversy, the so-called Freedom Tower is finally rising above the Hudson, and the footprints left by the old Twin Towers are now reflecting pools, surrounded by trees. In a few years – who knows? – a new generation of office workers will be taking their breaks in their shade.  And yet: life will never again be the same. Even if the last shards of glass, the last mounds of ashes are long gone, the toxic cloud that plumed and settled over Manhattan ten years ago this week is still silently working in the lungs of countless people who breathed it.

Of course the world has changed. The real question is if it has changed for the better: whether the shock of an unprecedented disaster was enough to sustain the waves of generosity, solidarity, and community that it set off, or whether they ebbed away as people pulled back from the brink, swore off their vulnerability as a weakness, and moved on.

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Your Turn. Tell us what you thought about this article:

Responses

Yes, the whole has changed, as always happens with events of this type.  Has it changed for the better?  No, of course not.  Why should we think it had.

The wounds of 911 will never even start to heal till the people of the US demand a full independent inquiry into what happened that day and why.

I'm sorry but over here not many of us believe the party line.

Derrick
Marçon, France