Twenty five years intervals

It has been twenty-five years since airplanes, hijacked by terrorists, struck each of the two towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan, and a third struck the Pentagon.

A fourth flight crashed in a rural field in western Pennsylvania, apparently because passengers resisted the hijackers/terrorists.

One odd thing about the 25th year commemorations -- they arrive as our ears are still ringing with the 250th anniversary of our independence as a nation. This means the period SINCE that terrorist attack represents one tenth of the period of our existence as a nation. THAT fractional amount will only increase with time. This makes me feel old.

The point? Just that once changes are underway they can proceed with dizzying speed and a quarter century zips away. Whoosh. Some of the changes that were set in place by the attacks of September 11 2001 are moving at dizzying speed even now. The United States responded by declaring a "War on Terror." What this turned out to mean was a war on Iraq -- which hadn't had anything to do with the September 11 attack -- implicitly (though our leadership would have denied it) we thus entered into an alliance with Iran, which had long even before then been checked by Iraq's weight in the region. So we occupied Iraq, strengthened Iran, and now ... wonder how high the price of crude oil is going to get.

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