A year ago this weekend, I stood several stories beneath the streets of lower Manhattan, in an enormous pit where the World Trade Center once stood, as the cornerstone was lowered for the building that would take its place, the Freedom Tower. It was hot and sunny and before the ceremony began, there were restless children playing and scampering around on the hard-packed dirt floor. I tried but failed to grasp the fact that some 2,700 people had died on the spot.
Today, city officials unveiled the revised plans for the Freedom Tower. The original design, distinctive in its architecture, was rejected last month because of its vulnerability to attack. News stories this afternoon reported that the new version of the skyscraper will be “straighter and more conventional,” set further back from the street and set atop a three-foot-thick concrete and metal base designed specifically to repel a truck bomb attack.
In February 1993, a truck bomb went off in a parking garage beneath the World Trade Center. Six people died and more than a thousand were injured. In hindsight, The 9/11 Commission Report noted, “although the bombing heightened awareness of a new terrorist danger” in the U.S., there remained a “widespread underestimation of the threat.”
I have two opposing thoughts. One is that we are resistant to change only until catastrophe of a certain magnitude. We live under a comfortable assumption of safety and well-being that’s nearly unshakeable. When destruction does occur, our memories of it are short.
My other thought seems supremely cynical but I believe it to be true. It was rekindled during Bush’s re-election campaign when he pledged to keep Americans safe from terror. No, he can’t. And no one can. It’s impossible to foresee; the methods and means and targets and the number of countries and groups in the world that aren’t so keen on America are far too great a number to possibly patrol.
That three-foot-thick base will look impressive and while we’re admiring it, someone somewhere will be cooking up some plans involving dirty bombs or biohazards or planes again or public transportation.
After I moved to New York, the book I wished I hadn’t read, particularly as I rode the subway to work every weekday, was Underground, novelist Haruki Murakami’s oral history of the sarin gassing in the Tokyo subway system in 1995. A dozen people died and thousands were injured. It was surprisingly easy to enact and there isn’t anything practical we could do to prevent something similar from happening here.
What to do? Press on. I’ll take the easy way out of the corner I’ve painted myself into by quoting from a story I’ve mentioned here before—Gene Weingarten’s exceptional Washington Post article from last summer, “Fear Itself: Learning to Live in the Age of Terrorism.”
You are not afraid of terrorism, really. You have weighed the facts and have concluded, rationally, that even if terrorists strike again in this country, the chances are negligible that you or anyone you know will be killed or injured. You feel no special tension when you place your seat tray in the upright position. You are old enough to have lived through other supposedly apocalyptic times, or you've surely heard about them—most famously, the silly spectacle of 1950s-era schoolkids giggling under their desks in anticipation of The Big One.
The recent warnings about terrorism during the election campaign have ratcheted up your concerns a little, but so what? You are going on with your life not as an act of defiance so much as a celebration of rationality. You will be fine.