9-11, the Day the World Changed

"Nobody move please, we are going back to the airport, don't try to make any stupid moves." And with those words the passengers of American Airlines Flight 77, remained in their seats. Passengers did take advantage of being so close to the ground and placed calls. Some called their loved ones, some like Flight Attendant Betty Ong use the in-flight phones on board the aircraft to phone into their employer, American Airlines. Only to tell operators that the plane had been Hijacked, and they were currently flying erratically and very low over what appeared to be a large metropolitan area, and eventually her line would go silent. It fell silent because Mohamed Atta and his crew would fly the plane into the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 am, September the 11^th, 2001. That flight was the first of three known attacks, a 4^th possible attack, and as some investigators have discovered there were even more involved that would have been the actual "second wave" of attacks had the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) not grounded any and all aircraft in the country following the initial events of that day. We often as in situations like this "why did this happen?" or even "how did this happen?" however the question should be posed to ask is, what effects of this day do to the world? Which is a good question ask, as September the 11^th, 2001 was truly the day the world changed.

So what made the events on that day so important to bringing the human psyche into a new way of thinking? Well for one we no longer had a massive delay in knowing what happened. When tragic events were being told to the rest of the planet such as the Titanic Disaster in 1912, the rest of the civilized world knew about it within days of it happening, and later in 1941 when Pearl Harbor was attacked in a somewhat similar style as the events of September the 11th, the rest of the country knew about the events in Hawaii a few hours after, but the events of September 11th were broadcast virtually live on the air. Another good way of understanding this is to understand that in 1963, there was a 29 minute delay in being told that President Kennedy had been shot and killed; now there was only a 29 second delay. That tends to let the viewing public more direct knowledge into the situation. But outside of the social impact of seeing the attacks being broadcast and rebroadcast in high definition digital quality, it truly almost started another level of the McCarthyism "witch hunts" for terrorist that were once set back in the 1950s against communism, only their new target was of course Terrorism and in the most extreme cases were any one of Arabic and Muslim origins. And it went to the point of making the Patriot Act to avoid the constitution of the United States. " The constitutional rights of privacy and liberty (over and above the protections of the Due Process Clause) have no clear textual support in the Constitution itself. As such, Court decisions that uphold these rights indicate their paramount importance. At least by comparison, the right to equal protection is apparent and unambiguous: "No state shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."41 Thus, unlike the right to privacy, the Court need not reach to find the principle of equality in the Constitution. Yet, in spite of the relative clarity of the clause's purpose, equal protection doctrine has not evolved to be as simple as an initial reading of the Constitution might make it seem. " (Cohen, 2010) It is only because of these attacks do we stop and actually look back in hindsight and realize that there is the very possibility the government of this country possibly perpetrated the events.

However, common sense tells you "no" to this concept as it would be impossible. The government for the better degree has actually engaged in operations of high statues before, in the death of John F. Kennedy we do know now almost forty years later that yes, the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) did in fact sponsor people who were known as "Ultra-Patriots" and acted in the death of the President, which of course was the death bed omission of E. Howard Hunt on his deathbed, which has not been dismissed by the general public as Hunt was well known from the situation of Watergate. Hunt admitted that there were no less than 20 "Covert Operatives" who did in fact assassinate Kennedy as result of his using diplomacy with Communist loyalist. However in the situation of September the 11^th, there is that conspiracy theorist that would like to believe that the government once again had something to do with the situation, which would be a false presumption, as to pull off such a situation, it would involve thousands, and even here ten years later, not one has come forward. Which in modern times, would not be a hard thing to have done, as there are countless ways to announce such a situation through anonymous ways. The conspiracy theorists hold on to the ideas of a conspiracy, but not the facts. They point to the Television show "The Lone Gunmen", which was a spinoff of the Television program "The X-Files" which was well known for its "secret government actions within the Government." They point to the very first episode of "The Lone Gunmen" in which the government flew a plane into the World Trade Center, with the intentions of blaming it on terrorist in order to gain public support.

The rows of conspiracies have been everything from Aliens, to a secret Jewish influenced group, to the Illuminati. The conspiracies have grown to the point in which scholars are even taking them serious, only to finally bowing down to common sense and realistic facts. One goes as far to say, " But in the nine years since the attacks, a growing number of people around the world have come to seriously question that assumption. Close examination of the evidence has revealed so many discrepancies in the official story, and so much that contradicts it, that many people are doubting what we have been led to believe about 9/11." (Everett, 2010) And even goes on to say for the concept of Osama Bin Laden, "Just after hearing a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, CIA Director George Tenet announced to his breakfast companion, "This has bin Laden all over it."2 Minutes later, after a member of his staff informed him a second plane had hit the World Trade Center, White House counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke concluded, "Well, now we know who we're dealing with." Then, as he burst into Vice President Dick Cheney's White House office, Clarke declared, "It's an Al-Qaeda attack."3 By 4 o'clock that afternoon, CNN reported that "U.S. officials" were saying they had "new and specific information" showing "good indications that people with links to Osama bin Laden may have been responsible for these attacks."4 These initial claims of who was responsible for 9/11 have, in mainstream discussion at least, mostly been accepted as beyond question. But proof has yet to be provided." (Everett, 2010)

However, no matter the concepts of dismissing Bin Laden as the mastermind behind the attacks, we were only able to see during the 2008 elections, that it boiled down to the Republican side of politics, assuming the role they did during the McCarthy era, and that was they were on the side of America, and if you were not with them, then you were with the enemy. We saw this first hand when Ex-Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin would repeat the name of the opposition "Barack Hussein Obama" over and over during her campaign speeches. During a few broadcasted incidents the Ex-Governor went as far as to "mistakenly" say the name Osama, instead of Obama. Which proved to be a political downfall for Palin and her running mate John McCain, as American values had already began to slip from the "ultra-conservative points of view as the economic downfall which was clearly blamed as the fault of the republicans happened. Most acknowledge this during the previous years, "we found more conservative political attitudes in general among a sample of Americans taken in 2001, one to two months after the Al Qaeda attacks on 9/11/01, as compared to a similar sample taken in 2000, ten to eleven months before the attacks. We did not address in that article, however, why we found conservative shifts on some items not directly related to the 9/11/01 attacks (e.g., Conservatives) but not on other similar items (e.g., Republicans). The present analysis supports the hypothesis that asking participants to report their attitude toward conservative President George W. Bush soon after 9/11/01 may have primed thoughts of terrorism, which caused participants, in turn, to generally show a conservative shift on the items following Bush, but not on the items preceding the Bush item. Notwithstanding this support, a further question that needs addressing is why there were marginally significant conservative shifts on two of the three post-Bush items that were analyzed, Socialized Medicine and Conservatives, but not on a third post-Bush item, Feminists (see Table 1). One possibility is that since the Feminists item was the third of the three post-Bush items, the effects of priming terrorism with the Bush item may have dissipated by the time participants responded to the Feminists item. Although speculative, such a possibility is consistent with the immediacy principle in Latane's (1981) social impact theory, which has received wide support across a variety of laboratory and real-world settings. Considering broader theoretical implications of the present findings, it will be recalled from the introduction and from Figure 1 that Nail and McGregor (2009) found conservative shifts following 9/11/01 of fairly equivalent magnitudes for liberals, moderates, and conservatives alike. This is an important finding because the motivated social cognition model of Jost et al. (2003) predicts a conservative shift for participants irrespective of their political orientation. In contrast, terror management theory (e.g., Greenberg et al., 1992) predicts that liberals and conservatives should each exaggerate their own baseline political leanings as a means of coping with threat. By this view, solace is hypothesized to be found in more strongly embracing one's pre-threat worldview (viz., worldview defense). Thus, conservatives should become more conservative following threat, and liberals more liberal." (Cohen, 2010)

However, outside of the effects it has had on the public, and the political repercussions that day has shaped the world and the system of government in general, and that is what is the result of society? Much can be said about the influence of media and movies, however as many know we follow media, but the media itself actually has been known to reflect on the society which has produced it. We have seen as recent as the "re-vamp" or retelling of the science fiction classic from the late 1970s of Battlestar Galactica that 9-11 had a most important impact on how we review things now. The story line in the most recent incarnation showed the home world being attacked by the "bad-guys" and in the end, much like we experienced on 9-11 those left in the wake of the attacks made their own memorial walls, showing the pictures of the fallen by the attack. In another science fiction film, Minority Report, it showed a possible future world in which the Patriot act had not only passed, but became a serious way of life. But what about the programs that came along specifically because of -9-11? We watched as the passengers of Flight 93 thwarted the four terrorist attacks and even watched as two firefighters were pulled from the wreckage of ground zero, much like they had been down in real life, through the eyes of Oliver Stone with his film, World Trade Center, made no more than five years after the attacks. "However, with the exception of productions such as United 93 or WorldTrade Center, from Paul Greengrass and Oliver Stone, cinematic reconstructions of 9/11, 3/11, and 7/7 have not proliferated between 2001 and 2009. Moreover, in 2006, the year when Greengrass and Stone released their films, a USA Today/ Gallup Poll revealed that roughly one in three Americans said they were likely to see films depicting events based on 9/11. In the face of scarce treatment through dramatic re-creations, Hollywood seemed to opt for fiction when tackling the questions posed by Thompson through popular genres such as the science fiction thriller, fantasy, or even dramas on historic scenarios prior to 9/11. In these fictional works, though direct references to the tragic day are avoided, there is a hypothetical discourse of contribution to the political debate, and often solutions are suggested to alleviate the social fractures, but always in the guise of entertainment. In an article appeared in 2004 about Hollywood and 9/11, David Puttnam made a bitter denunciation: Too often over the past 20-odd years, film-makers have failed to tap the emotional power of their medium, especially its ability to portray the world around us-either as it is, or as it has been. For the most part it fails to offer us any useful lessons. After September the 11th, a number of writers noted that the dreadful images witnessed that day seemed to have more in common with a contemporary movie than any imagined reality" (Sánchez-Escalonilla, 2010)

So in many respects that is just what the day of September the 11^th did. It affected us in many ways beyond the obvious financial and economic situations. The day flat out changed the world, in the ways we view technology and see what it is capable of, it has changed the very way we look at attacks, and accidents in general. The day changed the way politics are reviewed by some, and even changed the tactics that some sides of political parties are trying to gan favor in the public's light. And the day has changed the way books, film and media gain attention, and praise for creative abilities to make things appear more realistic. The day changed the world, because when you take all of these factors out of the mix, you are still need to review how other people look at other people and more importantly how people react to others. Countless times since September the 11^th, there have been cases in which a person of Arabic or Muslim origins has been harassed in some way, just because someone has remembered what took place on that day, and when the Arabic person steps into a bathroom on an airplane, they have been confronted. But in some respects, that can either be charged up to racism, or more importantly fear. Which in some respects can of course offset the idealism of racism or bigotry in that situation, and at least review in the situation, people do not want to die. And the fear of death is always something every human being has, especially when people fear dying because some other person just wishes to make a political and or religious statement. And that of course is ironic, as before September the 11^th, 2001, there was not much known about Muslims and who they were as a religion, and now we see a growing number, mainly as some people have realized that the actions of those on that fateful day were nothing but the actions of those who did not truly follow that religion, but just an insane version of it. Which is possibly the final vision given to humans on that day, as no one religion can assume for each of its followers?