08-05-2020, 11:11 AM
(This post was last modified: 08-05-2020, 11:19 AM by TeacherinExile.
Edit Reason: Punctuation
)
Anthony ‘58:
Thank you so much for posting this article, in full, and I’ll tell you why. First, the writer has the “lived experience” of that awful, tragic day. It’s one thing to watch TV replays of the twin towers set ablaze, then collapsing to their very foundations. 9/11 has left a visceral imprint on the entire country. But a video impression does not begin to match the personal hell of an eyewitness account, where one feels the reverberations of the implosion in the concrete canyons of Manhattan, and sees upclose the sheer panic etched on the faces of those running for their lives, not to mention the acrid smell of toxic dust and ash. In short, to have all five senses engaged at once. Second, the writer was on the “inside” as the policy response unfolded across administrations. And whose political perspective on the post-9/11 era has evolved over time, and justifiably so. Third, and most important, the writer’s personal account comes as close as anything I’ve read so far to establishing a linkage between our domestic and foreign policy response to the national security crisis of 9/11 and to the health care crisis we now confront.
As most of us know, our country’s reaction to the 9/11 attacks catalyzed the kind of all-out response a nation launches only in the face of an existential threat. Which is why, I suppose, that Strauss and Howe initially considered the scale of that attack as the 4T crisis they predicted in 1997. But, as time passed, and as the fear of a similar terrorist attack began to fade, I remember reading an editorial in USA Today by some expert who contended that future acts of terrorism, even on the scale of a 9/11, did not pose an existential threat to America. And I agreed with his premise. Indeed, I came to the view that the 9/11 attacks were a “lucky strike” that very likely could have been prevented—or, at the very least, mitigated—if only Bush II and the NSC had heeded months beforehand a not-so-vague intelligence memo warning of just such an attack. We can only wonder.
But before I could deem 9/11 as the beginning of a crisis era, I would have to read an analysis that makes a clear connection between 9/11 and subsequent crises, dot by dot: the Crash of ‘08, whose effects were trans-Atlantic; and COVID-19 which, as a pandemic, is truly global in scale. All three crises can be attributed in varying degrees to a pattern of unpreparedness. But there remain missing links, at least in my mind, as to how a Global War on Terror leads on directly to the Great Recession, and then to a public health crisis, twelve years later. I can only make a weak case connecting 9/11 to the 2007 housing bust, which I would base on the “advice” Bush II gave us in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.
What I do contend is that either 9/11 or the Financial Crash of ‘08 has to mark the beginning of the Fourth Turning crisis. To mark the start, instead, at 2020 with COVID-19—36 years after Reagan’s re-election in 1984...well that just screws up the whole timing of the theory, in my opinion.
Thank you so much for posting this article, in full, and I’ll tell you why. First, the writer has the “lived experience” of that awful, tragic day. It’s one thing to watch TV replays of the twin towers set ablaze, then collapsing to their very foundations. 9/11 has left a visceral imprint on the entire country. But a video impression does not begin to match the personal hell of an eyewitness account, where one feels the reverberations of the implosion in the concrete canyons of Manhattan, and sees upclose the sheer panic etched on the faces of those running for their lives, not to mention the acrid smell of toxic dust and ash. In short, to have all five senses engaged at once. Second, the writer was on the “inside” as the policy response unfolded across administrations. And whose political perspective on the post-9/11 era has evolved over time, and justifiably so. Third, and most important, the writer’s personal account comes as close as anything I’ve read so far to establishing a linkage between our domestic and foreign policy response to the national security crisis of 9/11 and to the health care crisis we now confront.
As most of us know, our country’s reaction to the 9/11 attacks catalyzed the kind of all-out response a nation launches only in the face of an existential threat. Which is why, I suppose, that Strauss and Howe initially considered the scale of that attack as the 4T crisis they predicted in 1997. But, as time passed, and as the fear of a similar terrorist attack began to fade, I remember reading an editorial in USA Today by some expert who contended that future acts of terrorism, even on the scale of a 9/11, did not pose an existential threat to America. And I agreed with his premise. Indeed, I came to the view that the 9/11 attacks were a “lucky strike” that very likely could have been prevented—or, at the very least, mitigated—if only Bush II and the NSC had heeded months beforehand a not-so-vague intelligence memo warning of just such an attack. We can only wonder.
But before I could deem 9/11 as the beginning of a crisis era, I would have to read an analysis that makes a clear connection between 9/11 and subsequent crises, dot by dot: the Crash of ‘08, whose effects were trans-Atlantic; and COVID-19 which, as a pandemic, is truly global in scale. All three crises can be attributed in varying degrees to a pattern of unpreparedness. But there remain missing links, at least in my mind, as to how a Global War on Terror leads on directly to the Great Recession, and then to a public health crisis, twelve years later. I can only make a weak case connecting 9/11 to the 2007 housing bust, which I would base on the “advice” Bush II gave us in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.
What I do contend is that either 9/11 or the Financial Crash of ‘08 has to mark the beginning of the Fourth Turning crisis. To mark the start, instead, at 2020 with COVID-19—36 years after Reagan’s re-election in 1984...well that just screws up the whole timing of the theory, in my opinion.