This page contains a Flash digital edition of a book.
[ THE BIG QUESTION ]


Can America Get Its Mojo C


By Chris Gonsalves


ARMEN NOBEL’S 9/11 STARTED at dawn with a cab ride to Boston’s Logan Airport. Nobel, a senior editor for the tech- nology magazine eWEEK, was on the road several times a month back then, covering trade shows and chronicling the quickly dying dot-com economy. She had no way of knowing that weeks before, she made a decision that saved her life. Nobel’s bosses had given her a choice: cover an event in Los Angeles or head to a similar one in Atlanta. Concerned about the impact busi- ness travel was having on her social life, she chose the shorter fl ight and quicker turnaround in Georgia. “I don’t even remember going through security, because back then going through security was no big whoop,” Nobel recalls.


As she headed down the terminal just before 7:30 a.m., the headline news monitors squawked the stories of the day. We were in the waning


9/11 VOICES “


Whenever I go to ground zero, I have two competing thoughts: The tremendous sense of loss and sorrow for the thousands we lost and for the family members who are suff ering so much, even now, 10 years later; and tremendous pride for the courage and the strength of the police, firefighters, and construction workers — everyone from every walk of life flooding in, not fleeing because they were afraid of another attack, but rallying to help deal with the consequences of that first horrible attack.


he — George Pataki | Former Governor of New York ” 90 9|11: A DECADE LATER / NEWSMAX / SEPTEMBER 2011


days of the “summer of sharks,” as reporters were referring to it, after a record 29 attacks, two of them deadly. The New York Yankees had just beaten the reeling Red Sox for the seventh time.


Nobel pulled her roller bag past the gate where American Airlines fl ight 11 was boarding for L.A. Had she chosen her assignment differ- ently, she almost certainly would have been on that plane. Trudging by, she was steps away from fi ve ter- rorists including Mohamed Atta, the 9/11 mastermind. They boarded their fl ight; she boarded hers. Before her feet touched ground again, the world would be a very different place. While few had a front-row seat to history like Carmen Nobel, most everyone remembers where they were and what they were doing on the morning of Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001 — the day American life changed forever. There are the big changes, of course: ongoing and expensive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the patriot Act, and similar initiatives born in


the name of national security such as onerous travel security checks. There are smaller, more personal changes as well. We need passports to travel to neighboring Canada and Mexico now. Immigration restric- tions are tighter, and visas can be diffi cult to obtain. And there have been other subtle changes to the way we work and play and pray and live, experts note. Most of it adds up to a general feeling of disqui- et and national malaise across the nation. “The horrible tragedy of 9/11 has in some ways shifted the arc of American history,” says Richard Stengel, managing director of Time magazine. The decade since “is one of the most sustained periods of pes- simism in American history.” Stengel in July presented fi nd- ings of a comprehensive poll tracking changes in America and Americans’ attitudes since 9/11. The survey, a joint project of Time and the Aspen Ideas Festival (AIF), found that two- thirds of those polled feel America is in decline. A full 71 percent say that we are


worse off now than we were at the beginning of the decade, while only 6 percent feel we’re doing better. Sixty-one percent say the events of


FLAG/MATT HANSEN PHOTOGRAPHY, DYNAMIC WILDLIFE PHOTOGRAPHY/FLICKR/GETTY IMAGES PATAKI/BLOOMBERG/GETTY IMAGES


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92  |  Page 93  |  Page 94  |  Page 95  |  Page 96  |  Page 97  |  Page 98  |  Page 99  |  Page 100  |  Page 101  |  Page 102  |  Page 103  |  Page 104  |  Page 105  |  Page 106  |  Page 107  |  Page 108  |  Page 109  |  Page 110  |  Page 111  |  Page 112  |  Page 113  |  Page 114  |  Page 115  |  Page 116