America Before And After 9/11

4 Pages 1037 Words

Ovidiu Radulescu

America before and after 9/11

Last month NEWSWEEK put out a special issue about our “new” new world. The editorialist says: “TV is now reality-TV, eating rats and bungee jumping doesn’t seems so compelling anymore; with real news to cover, the media gives an added bonus: Enron. Yes but we will never forgot 09/11. As we count the time from Jesus birth, BC – before Christ, and AD, Anno Domini (lat), a new line is now written on the history scroll: 9/11. And the media confirm this new kind of accounting: before 9/11 and after 9/11. Two different edges.
In the same issue, NEWSWEEK give us a 22 year-old Rachel Newman confession. She came to New York three years ago to be “a guitar musician in rebellion” against the establishment, like her mother, a ’69 Woodstock veteran. She had herself tattooed, crying: “I would have told you I was a musician, a poet, an artist,… a woman, a lesbian, and a Jew”. That morning, stepped out of the shower in her Brooklyn apartment to watch the second plane barrel into the South Tower. She confess: “In that moment, the world as I had known it was redefined. Weeks ago all I could think of was how to write a good rap… Now is the time to talk with God about my soul and find the meaning of the life because everything has changed.
Yes, everything has changed. This refrain has become as common in the post 9/11 world as the Dow Jones level for a broker. For decades, Americans have been paralyzed by intellectual, moral, and religious relativism, about our own history and institutions. We have tried to be multicultural, as if we had no culture of our own. Exhibitions of fait and patriotism have been embarrassing, politically incorrect, and primitive. But now that our nation has been attacked, this is changing. Americans are seeing that we have a civilization worth defending. And America displays a fresh look to the world, a new “New America”.
How did the culture ...