World Trade Center Attack, Five Years Later

If you want to know what I wrote about the World Trade Center five years ago, and two years ago, go to this page at Omnitectural Forum.

Five years later, the event of the towers' destruction still seems pivotal to me, but I no longer feel that American society treats it as an urgent political event. In fact, I fear that its anniversary is really an unremarkable and mostly overlooked day.

Then again, what else can be said or written? We have had five years to change the world in which the event happened to one in which is would be improbable -- and we have not done so. Our media has become even less reliable, our government more corrupt, and our world remains in turmoil. Yet there is great hope in that the unmitigated flow of political and technological power that shaped 9/11 is proving unsustainable, and the ways to resist the social impacts of that flow are more within our grasp than ever.

I hope that if in five years 9/11 is an uneventful day, it is because I am comfortable with the society in which I live and not because it's the same mess on a different day.