Quote:
Originally Posted by Roadcruiser1
One of the interesting things is before 9/11 an act like what Philippe Petit on the Twin Towers in 1974 would not end up in someone getting shot, but if something like that happened today they would shoot first and ask questions later. We lost our innocence on 9/11. I wished the new World Trade Center would have the same effect, but we will never now till 30 years after 9/11.
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I don't know if you've seen Wolfgang Staehle's video, but here's a link to a story on it:
http://click.si.edu/Story.aspx?story=32
Staehle intended it to represent the banality of surveillance, because nothing ever really changed day to day, prior to 9/11, on the New York City skyline. When it captured the strike, he said, "I stood in history's bath and it ran over me."
He was innocent, and he wasn't expecting it. I don't think we've lost our innocence as much as we've had a difficult time being forced into consciousness. 9/11 is partially the result of technology changing in a way that would have allowed the terrorists to engineer a major strike, and partially because that terrorist unit was evolving into a force that would engineer such a strike, which was something that we would have anticipated as a public if we'd been aware of it enough to anticipate it.
There's a long history of our engagement with the Middle East that set the stage for this or something similar as a result of how we'd engaged and drawn out post-Gulf, but for the public, that stage was an occasional news blot and no one was conscious of the repercussions. We would have lost our innocence eventually, what we should miss is prior consciousness.