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The world stood transfixed in the wake of a carefully planned series of hijackings that destroyed the World Trade Center, crippled the Pentagon and took the lives of more than 5,000 men, women and children. On a sunny September morning, the world dramatically changed. What is the long-term significance?
by Melvin Rhodes
The horrifying attacks on Sept. 11 in New York City and Washington, D.C., stunned the world. The terrorist assaults-the hijackings and suicide crashes of four domestic passenger jets-were the worst on any nation in history.
A collective national shock hung over the land as people tried to make sense of what had happened. No sooner had Americans begun to recover than another wave of horror began when anonymous envelopes carrying anthrax bacteria led to the infection of people in several cities and reached even into the offices of the U.S. Congress.
Television and radio stations broadcast continuous news coverage for days in attempts to explain the shocking events.
The country's sense of invincibility
vanished in an instant. Suddenly people who were normally happy and confident
grew apprehensive about their future. The old certainties were no more. Against
a backdrop of a smoldering World Trade Center, the British magazine The Economist
summed up the mood of the people and the new reality in a headline on its
cover
of Sept. 15: "The Day the World Changed."
Nothing has been the same since Sept. 11. Nothing will be the same in the foreseeable future.
Entering a new era
Americans rightly wondered what the future holds for the country. As is so often the case in the wake of a national catastrophe, a nation's strengths and weaknesses come to the fore. Americans came together after the atrocity. Rescuers labored around the clock in dangerous, distressing conditions to try to pull survivors from a mound of rubble some 12 stories high. Tens of thousands of people donated blood and items urgently needed by the Red Cross. On the streets of New York people hugged strangers and offered help in a time of unprecedented distress.
The president and the Congress came together, political rivalries temporarily forgotten, as both major political parties pledged themselves to vanquish those responsible. The military forces of the United States, Britain and other nations immediately began to pool their resources, determined to stamp out terrorism. America and its allies quickly launched a war against Afghanistan's ruling Taliban regime, which had long given refuge to Islamic terrorists.
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