Tuesday, September 11
The thing that stands out most to me is how new this all seems to be to people. Given the adage that violence in the news and entertainment media have dulled us all to the true horror of it, and the similarity of this attack to other recent incidents such as the first world trade center bombing, I did not expect this extreme level of public shock and disturbance. People are acting (perhaps justifiably) as if this is something absolutely unexpected and unprecendented, for which they were completely unprepared. The uniqueness of this event seems to be in the combination of several factors which on their own might not have created such a dramatic response: the fact that multiple attacks occured at once; the high level of coordination and calculation that must have gone into it; the fact that this occurred on American soil; and the fact that we have no clear idea who did this or why. The word that people are using to describe all this is "magnitude," but I think it's more about this confluence of elements. Personally, the bandying about of these sorts of scenarios in both news and entertainment have, I think, made this seem like less of a total upheaval to me. It all seems somehow inevitable, and the way it is playing out feels very calmly predictable in all of its chaos and confusion.
