9/11 could happen again

When I visited the trenches of northern France a century after the First World War ended, I found farmers’ plows still turning up munitions and dead men. Like little children who enjoy tasting the sweetness of ant poison, we harm ourselves out of ignorance of past causes. Unexploded ordnance may or may not hurt us — better to stay clear. In cases of foreign policies deployed by variously zigzagging administrations, we lose sight of which boobytraps were buried where and why. Even when there is continuity in government, we forget our own doings until they detonate. Thus 11 September, 2001, that dire shock whose collision momentum irresistibly knocked us out of reality as we had understood it — perhaps because we had failed to understand it accurately — and into something terrifying, agonizi