Invisible Changes

How very much can change in how very little time. Americans awaken this morning just 48 hours after It happened. As a suddenly less innocent nation, we see and even hear the world differently, surprisingly not always for the worse.

Never mind our emotional sluggishness, that inchoate sense of loss and spiritual fatigue, even for those who knew no one anywhere near the terrorist attacks. Because of television, we all were there.

As recently as Tuesday’s dawn, skyscrapers--any skyscrapers--stood as towering testaments to mankind’s ingenuity, full of strength, hard work and imagination. In California they stood gracefully through earthquakes, mostly impervious to the worst elements of nature. This morning no one sees a skyscraper without thinking frightening things about weakness and fire, glass shrapnel, falling rubble and the vulnerability of such structures to the worst elements of mankind.

The new view perhaps parallels what builders and survivors of the unsinkable Titanic felt 48 hours afterward.

Two invisible elements melted with the steel in Tuesday’s dusty infernos. One was trust, trust in big strong structures like the massive Pentagon and in institutions like the airport security apparatus. An innocence also perished, a belief that some acts are unimaginable. As painfully learned as it was, this new realism will be a benefit to survival for free peoples in a world where a determined few believe that mass murder is a glorious thing--or cynically persuade their followers of this.

Americans became inured to tragic car bombs and other terrorism overseas; now, just as mugging victims later see dark doorways, we see them as reminders. Even a plane flying overhead sparks nervous glances.

The memories also include heroism that makes us gasp. Even as they fled down the smoky stairways of the about-to-crumble World Trade Center, terrified people reportedly applauded courageous firefighters racing up those same steps to confront the blaze and, we fear, their fate. Not noted as sentimental sorts, New Yorkers and thousands elsewhere waited hours to bleed into sterile bags for victims they’ll never know.

Americans were very comfortable in their freedoms before this week, before that bloody line was drawn. Tuesday’s toll could easily exceed the deadliest day in America, the Battle of Antietam 139 years ago come Monday, when 4,800 Americans died. But that was an old-fashioned war with brave soldiers fighting brave soldiers, not the modern variety with terrorists killing anyone handy, especially innocents. While wars have changed, the sometimes awful costs of freedom have not.