September 11, 2002

In the year since the terrorist attacks of last September 11th, many of us have repeatedly looked in the mirror to ask: What has changed? Shock and sadness remain with us, but there is also a determined sense that we face challenges - as individuals and as a civilization - that were unknown a year ago.

Even more unsettling, we recognize that America or another country may well be attacked by surprise once again, and are left wondering if such an event will match or exceed the horror of last year. We have all been hurt and are convinced that there are people who, having honed their malignant audacity to a sharp point, are now planning to hurt us again.

In memory, then, the Twin Towers still stand tall, still cast a shadow into our lives. What happened to them was unimaginable until, through deliberate action, it became real. Against all expectation, and contrary to our wishes, this violence has put us in front of choices we had not seen before.

In many ways, this is the story of the 20th century. Violence and brutality that were once beyond the realm of possibility now seem commonplace. Adapting to the latest horror, we conclude - repeatedly, and despite all evidence to the contrary - that we have at last seen all that there is to see. But then we are shocked into recognizing that our imagination failed us - there was worse to come.

The philosopher Berel Lang brilliantly analyzed how cataclysmic violence reshapes our conception of the world. In "The Future of the Holocaust," he wrote that those generations born before the genocide of European Jewry "at least began life in a different world, one from which genocide was absent, in which that occurrence was quite inconceivable." For those born afterward "that absence was dismissed before they were born. They do not remember the world without it."

There is no comparison to be made between the Holocaust and the events of September 11th, yet Lang's insight underscores a larger point about the transforming power of new forms of mass violence. Thinking about ourselves, and the world we now live in, his phrase is worth repeating: "They do not remember the world without it."

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September 11, 2001 emerges then as the starting point of something new: a world in which the events of September 11th have become real. From that bright September morning onward, those events have been and will be a reference point for anyone who would use them. A year ago, the idea that some number of young men would come to the US to train as pilots, hijack four fully loaded passenger jets, and then turn them into missiles to be exploded into some of the most important symbols of Western civilization - was inconceivable. Today, it is a contingency that must be accounted for in every trip to the airport.

This is not only a matter of heightened security. Our understanding of the world, of our freedom to act in the world, and the possibilities of violence aimed at us because of who we are - these have all changed.

Here lies the difference between September 11, 2001 and September 11, 2002. Until then, we shared a certain sense of what was and was not possible. Since then, we struggle with the shock that something so large could have happened - could have taken so much from us - without our having anticipated any of it. This first anniversary of the attack will be the first and sharpest of many annual reminders that once again history has turned the unimaginable into the real.

This is the realization that lies underneath our all-encompassing focus on security. We will not wait for another version of this lesson. It has now become the central principle of our interaction with the world, and it will be for the foreseeable future.

Beyond the vast questions of geopolitics and security, we might also hope for another realization to come out of September 11th. The international dimension of the attacks also includes an encounter with the after-effects of violence, and the longer-term problems of understanding what happened and how it changed us. In this, Americans are finding out that they now have more in common with many members of the international community than they had ever imagined possible.

Americans, too, are now recovering from a brutal act of violent dislocation, a phenomenon the United States has long been spared, but one familiar in many places around the world. The events of September 11th hit America because of who Americans are, and those events transformed the moral horizon of the world community. Yet, even so, Americans are not alone in living in the aftermath of violence.

September 11, 2002 commands an authority that was unimaginable a year ago. The calendar has now fully cycled, setting the attack itself apart from our memories of what happened. In commemorating the passage of a year, we mark the passage from "before" to "after." Looking back a year, we see how the future has changed.

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