I just read this very good piece by Peggy Noonan that I picked up from Rex Hammock’s blog.
The article is divided into three segments. The first two sections compare our modern lives with the lives of our parents, and focuses on the irony that all of our time saving devices have led to a serious lack of free time. The third, and last section, predicts that we in America are ripe for a big change. She points out that to much of the world the US is the Great Satan and consequently we have a huge target on our chest. She predicts that those people will target our greatest city to try and puncture our aura of supposed invincibility. She thinks that it will most likely be New York, but maybe Washington. Oh, and she wrote this in 1998.
In the end she looks at how such an event might change us. In many ways she was right, especially immediately after 9/11. She says:
We must take the time to do some things. We must press government
officials to face the big, terrible thing. They know it could happen
tomorrow; they just haven’t focused on it because there’s no Armageddon
constituency. We should press for more from our foreign intelligence
and our defense systems, and press local, state, and federal leaders to
become more serious about civil defense and emergency management.The other thing we must do is the most important…
I once talked to a man who had a friend who’d done something that took
his breath away. She was single, middle-aged and middle class, and
wanted to find a child to love. She searched the orphanages of South
America and took the child who was in the most trouble, sick and
emotionally unwell. She took the little girl home and loved her hard,
and in time the little girl grew and became strong, became in fact the
kind of person who could and did help others…“These are the things that stay God’s hand,” he told me. I didn’t know
what that meant. He explained: These are the things that keep God from
letting us kill us all.So be good. Do good. Stay his hand. And pray. When the Virgin Mary
makes her visitations—she’s never made so many in all of recorded
history as she has in this century—she says: Pray! Pray unceasingly!
My fear is that now we are once again forgetting to pray.
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Befuddled 
Given that there’d already been one attempt to destroy the World Trade Center, in 1993, this wasn’t as prescient as it appears.
When I lived in New York (1982-83), I always thought of the WTC as a target, particularly when I was there visiting my PR agency’s clients.
You make a good point, especially when you add Oklahoma City. Not the event itself, but the assumption that most of us made that Middle Eastern terrorists were responsible.
It is easy to forget the build up to 9/11, but I’ll never forget how surprised I was anyway. I was in the Pentagon parking lot that morning (my commute into DC took me through there every day) about 1 1/2 before the plane hit. My office was a couple of blocks from the White House and at one point we thought it had been hit.
So I guess the surprise to me, and I suspect to alot of people, wasn’t that the WTC or the Pentagon would be hit by terrorists, but that such a fundamental change to our way of thinking and living would happen overnight. I think she anticipated that aspect pretty well.