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Yes, I know, I\u2019m seeing lots of headlines of articles that I\u2019m not reading, revisiting the events of September 11th, as they are sometimes blandly and generically labelled.\u00a0 Where were you when you first heard the news?<\/em>, they always ask, then answer for themselves, or they profile some hero of the day.\u00a0 (Me, I was getting my toddler ready for daycare when my husband called and said, \u201cturn on the TV,\u201d just after the first plan had struck but before the second, when I then watched live on TV.\u00a0 This was in the early days of \u201csurfing the internet at work\u201d so he was able to see that something<\/em> had happened but CNN was frozen and the system was too slow to see what.)<\/p>\n But \u2014 I dunno, maybe I\u2019m getting old.\u00a0 That no longer seems like a marker for when everything changed<\/em>.<\/p>\n I grew up, after all, during the Cold War.\u00a0 Sting assured us that we were safe if \u201cthe Russians loved their children too,\u201d but The Day After<\/em> (which aired when I was a high school freshman, and near as I could tell, everyone at school had watched it) told us about the horrible things that would happen if they didn\u2019t.\u00a0 At any rate, that status quo seemed to be a pretty permanent one, yet, in the end, it all unraveled fairly quickly, from the liberalization in Hungary and Poland, to the fall of the Berlin Wall, to the dismantling of the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n Then we thought for a brief period that this would truly bring about a new era, rather than recognizing that all manner of conflicts existed and would continue to exist that we had simply perceived of as \u201cfixed\u201d due to the end of the Cold War.\u00a0 We had a little blip in the form of the first Iraq War, but that was over soon enough.\u00a0 Remember Bill Clinton\u2019s \u201cpeace dividend\u201d?\u00a0 That was magical.\u00a0 But as a result we were wholly unprepared for 9\/11 (despite the prior attacks that weren\u2019t really on our radar) and it was a great shock that not only did Islamic Terrorism exist but that it would affect us in the United States.<\/p>\n Now, of course, we\u2019ve been living in that new reality for 18 years.\u00a0 Our children have grown up with terror attacks being a regular component of the news, and at some point not long ago, after a round of \u201cwhat\u2019s the first news report you remember in your childhood?\u201d, I asked my youngest, whose answer was \u201csome terrorist attack, but I don\u2019t remember the details.\u201d\u00a0 (Was it one of those in France?\u00a0 In San Bernardino?\u00a0 Elsewhere?)<\/p>\n At the same time, those attacks have been declining in prevalence.\u00a0 Has ISIS\u2019s defeat in Iraq and its near-defeat in Syria taken away the attractiveness of its preaching to disillusioned Westerners and to Muslim immigrants dissatisfied with the lack of streets paved with gold?\u00a0 Have the United States and the various European governments become better at disrupting terrorist networks?\u00a0 Will we let down our guard with the receding of this threat?<\/p>\n And what new threats will surface in the future, that we\u2019re only vaguely aware of now?\u00a0 Will China, once believed to be well on its way to greater levels of democracy and freedom, now clamping down with its social credit laws, persecution of the Uighurs, demolition of churches, and Xi\u2019s creation of a Maoist personality cult, be our foe in a new Cold War?\u00a0 Will cultural conflict within our borders expand in scope beyond periodic reports of Antifa vs. Proud Boy fights or disputes over white privilege, affirmative action, immigration, etc., to us. vs. them fights that take place in the real world rather than just on twitter?<\/p>\n And beyond Big Events, well, right now there\u2019s no end of handwringing about climate change.\u00a0 Where this is headed I don\u2019t really know but maybe years of being told that we were at risk of extinction by nuclear war has conditioned me to be skeptical of the newest claims of impending catastrophe and leads me to picture, instead, my children telling their children, at some point in the future, \u201cdon\u2019t worry so much about [as yet unimagined future worry]; after all, when we were kids everyone thought the world was going to end due to Global Warming but it\u2019s fine.\u201d<\/p>\n So maybe I\u2019m just getting old but the September 11th terrorist attacks, terrible though they were, are increasingly becoming just one piece of an overall landscape of history as I witnessed it (directly and through news reporting of such).<\/p>\n How about you?<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Yes, I know, I\u2019m seeing lots of headlines of articles that I\u2019m not reading, revisiting the events of September 11th, as they are sometimes blandly and generically labelled.\u00a0 Where were you when you first heard the news?, they always ask, then answer for themselves, or they profile some hero of the day.\u00a0 (Me, I was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[182,467,353],"class_list":["post-15378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-history","tag-september-11","tag-terrorism"],"yoast_head":"\n