About 9/11

[Sarah Beth]

I had an email this morning from a friend of mine who is from NYC. He was talking about how the couple of days before and just after this date he gets really down and saddened. It got me to thinking about how much all that changed the world and how on that day when I heard about it I didn't realize what an impact it would have. I think I was in a state of shock I kept on working and wondering, it seemed so far away and so unreal.

It hit me most later over the next few days when I started to realize there were people I knew who were directly affected by what had happened. It is truely such a small world that an event like that one can affect us all no matter where we live in this world.

We need peace, love and understanding.

[Anthony Simon]

I did know pretty much at the time that it had changed the world. What way I didn't know. It changed all the rules about what can happen to ordinary people just going about their business (as opposed to soldiers, say).

Like now everyone can be killed for reasons which are kind of obscure IMO (at least to the ordinary person).

The other way I can think of it changed things is it was kind of like a movie come to life. Which is to say some really bad fantasy made real. So then it kind of breaks down the barriers in peoples' heads about what might happen in that way also - who's to say other dreadful fantasies might not also come true.

That sort of stuff tends to erode people's sense of security even when specific security threats have long gone.

[Paulette]

I was shocked by the towers falling, and spent the next week trying to comfort my juggling friends in New York. (They all practice at the Carmine St gym, not far from the towers.) But I didn't realize how much of the American psyche had changed until I heard the first of NPRs day-long call-in shows, where a woman caller said that she was willing to pre-emptively nuke any country that might pose a threat to her children.

Might pose a threat.

So much for the Golden Rule and the Categorical Imperative.

If they scare her, she claims the right to kill them. All of them.

Wow.

But I don't think it changed the rest of the world as much as it did us. We've become more frightened, certainly, but we're also frightening the world, too, because we really could destroy everyone else if we were frightened enough.