Brown Knows - When Tina

Brown Knows - When Tina Brown isn't editing vapid lifestyle magazines, she writes some excellent stuff, like this piece on how New Yorkers are missing that post-9/11 feeling:

For New Yorkers, 2002 was one long morning after. We all just want to log off and slink away with a huge pile of DVDs and a mug of hot chocolate. After 9/11 we expected a paradigm shift, the discovery of what we really wanted for our children, our country, ourselves...

It was also, I suspect, the attempt to rekindle how we felt in the first months after the terrorist attacks. New Yorkers secretly miss the people they became at that time, elevated by a new connectedness and the exhilarating absence of materialistic trivia. Beneath the city’s pace for a while there was a new undertow of meaning.

It's that "rekindling feeling" bit I wonder about. Bear with me here:

In "Modern Times - a History of the World from the Twenties through the Eighties" - Paul Johnson notes about the beginning of the First World War that

• contrary to popular myth, the young people of Europe were the ones most eager to get into the war,
• This eagerness was borne of a desire to participate in something "bigger" than the workaday lives they (Europe's youth) saw stretching in front of them, and
• the older generation - many of whom remembered the Boer or Franco-Prussian wars - were much more wary of the conflict that ensued.

Yes, we have ample reason to hit back at terror. AND invade Iraq, for that matter. But I wonder if America isn't also looking for something "bigger" than the pretty normal, pretty comfy life we have?

It's a two-edged sword, if so.

Posted by Mitch at December 30, 2002 08:53 AM