On 2001-10-10 13:07, oddlystrange wrote:



I do really beleive (sic) that we've crossed the border between fall and winter. The leaves are dropping, I don't see a lot of talk about the "problems" that we had before this happened. No one on any of my mailing lists is talking about going to "pro-this" or "anti-that" rallies, and are inviting people to red cross fund raisers, and never getting a negative response.

Welcome to the site, and I can agree with you. I live in the Pacific Northwest, and prior to WTC, we had the Anarchy people burning cars in dealerships, (because they are to big for the road and fuel efficient), pickets and protesters still chaining themselves to trees, etc. Some of this has gone on for 20 years. In fact we had a bunch of 13ers burn a fleet of log trucks recently. We have the USFS district offices torched occasionally, and boycots of manufactured goods. Nike in Portland is always in hot water for sweatships, etc. The Seattle riots (World Trade)were fueled by people from, among other places, Eugene, who came up in busses to march and kick in windows last year. Inagine driving 5 hours to get arrested, when you can do it in your own backyard.

My point is that all these people are terrorists. Indistinguishable from our enemy in the middle east. But much of this will end, for a couple of reasons.

First, national security is so paranoid right now, that the people who were arrested last year would be shot now. Anglo or not, shot dead for the amarchy that brews so well here.
Second, as our hosts indicated, domestic crime will likely fall during a pulling-together. We will have less domestic violence, less divorce, and a whole lot less protests in the months to come.

During every new crisis, a new definition of the word patriot arises. It will take 20 years to define America, if history is any guide.

On 2001-10-10 13:07, oddlystrange wrote:
Many years ago, in the throws of my teen angst I read "13th Gen," and giggled most of the way through the book. Then I heard about the "The Fourth Turning," and put it aside as something that I'd look into later, one day, when I had the time.

Welcome, Oddlystrange!

Then the WTC attack happened, and suddenly my interest was piqued again in this book. Because even without reading the book (which I'm most of the way through now), I just *felt* that something more had happened.

We've added on a whole slew of new T4Ters since 911...and I understand book sales are WAY up!

I'm a pretty generic 13er (if there is such a thing :smile: ), but I'm a cusper -- born of Boomer parents, pretty much raised around the Boomer generation -- not the silent (I was born in 1974).

You're no cusper. 1974 is pretty much smack-dab in the middle of Gen-X (13ers if you prefer).

But I certainly do not want to consider myself a Millenial because I don't really "get" them.

I don't "get" them either. Sometimes they seem like an alien species, don't they?

But one thing did interest me about the earliness of this turning, and cuspers like myself, I think it might be fair to compare us to that hybrid generation of Nomads and Heros from the Cival War era.

My feeling is, since this 4T appears to have started so early, that the Millie/X boundary has (or will) move from 1981-2 to 1979-80. Many of those we thought of as late Xers will be on the front lines.

Things that mattered to me on Sept. 10, don't really seem that important anymore.

I know exactly what you mean. One fan site for "The Real World" announced it was going to shut down, as the moderator no longer felt the program was "relevant" in light of the events of 911. Also, the Emmys were cancelled because many felt it would not be appropriate to air it. People are taking this all in stride, and nodding their heads sadly but knowingly. Examples of this sort of thing are happening all over. This sudden loss of interest in all things 3T because of their "irrelevance" is, to me, the biggest reason I am convinced we are in the 4T. More so than the flag-waving, more so than the patriotism, more so than the event itself. The mood has done a compelte about-face. No one cares what dress some Hollywood star is wearing anymore, or how much the car of some sports icon cost. Such things just seem....shallow.

from a purely statistical standpoint, the generations aren't in place yet.

Yes, but they're almost there.

Mr. Stonewall Patton observes the "saeculum" thus:

"We have had six major realignments in our history:

1800
1828
1860
1896
1932
1968"

Marc Lamb addresses Patton's "major realignments" in American history here.

Last week I assigned my Contemporary American Studies class the following essay topic: "Recent events have been compared to Pearl Harbor, and we are indeed at war. However, the parallels being drawn may not be accurate. Based on our discussions, readings and your own observations, do you think your generation is more likely to find itself drawn to the wartime attitudes of the WW2 generation or the 60's generation?" I collected the essays today.

Up to this point, we have read numerous articles on various cultural trends and historic events (Hiroshima, Marshall Plan, GI Bill of Rights, Northward Migration of African-Americans), parts of The Fifties by David Halberstram, and Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. (We plan on reading The Fourth Turning next.)

I will post some of their comments and give you % breakdown of attitudes, as soon as I complete them. (For the most part, these are very bright high school seniors, many of whom were in AP US History last year.)

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Kevin1952 on 2001-10-10 19:29 ]</font>

OK, I don't know about you, but I do know about myself. I did not feel a mood change after the Nasdaq crash, or the election tie, or the other events suggested here as possible triggers. Within minutes of grasping what had happened on September 11, I felt that the country would never be the same again. Nothing since has changed my mind. The other turnings began with similar mixtures of the old and new Turnings. This is not "dying down" as the earlier events did, so that is an additional consideration. It is now a month later, and I am willing to stop fence sitting. I might, as always, be wrong, but I feel confident enough to go on record as saying that I now believe the 911 attack was the catalyst.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Tom Mazanec on 2001-10-10 19:51 ]</font>

kevin 1952,

if you don't mind i would recommend two other books you might consider adding to your classes reading list. they would be the "rise and fall of the great powers" by paul kennedy and "the great wave" by david hackett fischer, both noted historians.

Excellent essay question, Kevin1952!

While Mr. Mazanec longs to "feel a mood change," may I remind our viewers that the opposite of "feel" is... fact?

While I would never dream of discounting what is "felt", I am not at all convinced that "feelings" make a world go round. I am quite sure that many folks, at one time, "felt" the world was flat, that the sun "arose" in the morn, and "set" in the eventide. Is "truth" to be held hostage to what one "feels"?

High and mighty, and quite un"feeling" as I may seem with my weighty words, but perhaps one might consider another view of all things turning?

What I, and people I am talking to, feel *IS* a fact...and is critical to whether we are entering the Fourth Turning. The attack on the WTC/Pentagon is a spark. Whether it is the catalyst is determined by how the nation reacts to it in the coming months and years...and *that* is determined by what people feel about the event!
Also, I have some personal bad news. Several times I have made reference to a friend who has connections to the CIA and who is very insightful on strategic developments. I never mentioned his name, because he values his "on-line" privacy.
His name was Ed Langley. I just received a phone call from his son that he had suffered an aneurysm and a subsequent heart attack, and had died. We met through play-by-mail games, and our long distance phone calls were well worth the cost to me. I tried to get him to get the book after the attack...now I'll never know his thoughts on the theory (he was an advocate of cyclical theories of history, but had never read our particular authors).

Mr. Mazanec implies, "What I, and people I am talking to, feel *IS* a fact...and is critical to whether we are entering the Fourth Turning."

Whether, or not, we are "entering the Fourth Turning," has nothing to do with how many bodies lie upon the ground once the dust has cleared. In the post-WWI era, nearly 60 millon souls had met a preliminary fate of "untimely death," world-wide, due to circumstance beyond their control.

My condolences, sir, in your obvious, most painful loss.

A Crisis is not decided by body count, but by how people respond to it, if I understand Strauss and Howe correctly. If AIDS killed tens of millions of Americans instead of scores of thousands (virtually every non-monogamous citizen), but we continued to treat it roughly as we have the last couple decades, it would still be an Unravelling, and not a Crisis. On the other hand, if we enlisted the Army to conduct house to house searches for unlicensed pets, and put the owners in prison camps after shooting said pets, that would be a Crisis (obviously, I am exaggerating to make an illustration). That is why the fact that people are acting really scared and angry, and are maintaining those emotions even after the first month, is convincing me that we have turned the corner.

On 2001-10-10 22:52, Tom Mazanec wrote:
...
That is why the fact that people are acting really scared and angry, and are maintaining those emotions even after the first month, is convincing me that we have turned the corner.

These thoughts about the Crisis having begun are certainly persuasive. I?ve been asking myself why I?m holding out for a more traumatic trigger, and reflecting on events in the past when a shock affected the national mood, but still didn?t turn the corner.

Father: When I was you?re age, I got straight A?s in History.
Son: Yeah, but Dad ? when you were my age, there wasn?t so much of it.

When I was in 7th Grade, a teacher came to the front of our classroom with a map of the USA on the front page showing that a nuclear missile from Cuba would take a few minutes to hit us. In a way, the Cuban Missile Crisis shocked us with a fear that was worse than 911, because though we all had known that nuclear war could destroy us all, it had never been so immanent. I recall it as a serious mood change that was never reversed. It undermined confidence in our elders in a way that presaged the 2ud Turning.
Still, I agree with S&H that it took the JFK assassination to trigger it.
What that means, unfortunately, is that I?m looking for something worse to shock us. I really hope I?m just overly pessimistic, but while I feel the change, I don?t see most of us changing our lives fundamentally to meet the danger.
I?m afraid that what might bring it about is a true economic crash. And this could be brought on by the current administration policies, inherited from the same old ?trickle-down? ideology that assumes that government must always shore up the big corporate financiers, and the rest of us are on our own. There?s very little dissent for this nonsense, and it wouldn?t surprise me completely if the next 4T begins much like the last one.

To Marc Lamb.

You raise an interesting point on how Tom "feels" a change but it may not be shown by fact. It reminded me if an earlier chastisement:

On 2001-10-05 20:37, HopefulCynic68 wrote:

On 2001-10-05 16:06, Delsyn wrote:

You seem to be approaching this discussion as though human beings are rational and do things dictated only by facts that can be verified as objective reality. This is false. Facts are important, to be sure, but much of the way we (and by "we" I mean all of us, the whole human race) view the world is colored by our beliefs - by the stories we tell ourselves and each other.

Perhaps we have two camps of observers commenting on this website. The classic/romantic split; suggested by Robert Pirsig and his ilk, or in more basic principles, those who look externally for the problem/solution, and those who look internally.

Much of what I have voiced previously is geared for Americans to be introspective, toward raising their own foreign policy questions. Instead, most contributors seem to focus on external events as catalysts only. Does not a society change internally? Most here believe that the world does this to us, not the other way around.

Certainly our bombing is reactionary, but as Susan mentioned a couple of days ago, maybe internal conflict at home will continue indefinately. You can believe the school children in Northern Ireland get a lesson on why the violence exists, everyday. So in the end, we may finally learn to look at our own society. I think, feel and hope that doing so is the right thing.

911 is called a "tragedy"; but tragedies are entertainment. When the real catalyst comes, it will be called an atrocity.

I'm going to have to disagree with you on this one. It's really easy to notice a mood change in the American landscape in regard to this attack (more people are calling it an attack than tragedy, being the first point).

But the main thing is think back before this happened, when the idea that planes full of people would be used to dive bomb buildings belonged in the realm of implausible, unthinkable, and impossible.

We had plenty of events that COULD have triggered the same rallying moods that we see today. Why didn't Oklahoma City produce the same flag waving "let's get them!" mentality that we see today?

Furhtermore, and prolly more apt to this discussion, why didn't the prior attacks by Al Queda produce the same kind of retaliation that we see now.

The World Trade Center was already bombed once by these people, and there was narry a snort of public outrage about it. There was no outcry for war, there was no outcry that true "justice" for those bombers is a 6 foot hole in the ground.

There have been a lot of events that rung similar to this attack, at least in their shocking ferocity at the time they occured. But none seemed to have the same mood shift that this one did.

I admit, I don't know if this is perminant. I'll don by 13-er cynicism for a moment, and say that I do fear that all this flag waving has the reek of being a fad, but at the same time, I also see more fundamantal changes. I see people who say that they fear Arabs, that they want the Visa system overhauled or completely done away with.

I'm seeing signs and portents that make me beleive that even when people tire of stars and bars, that the resolve is there to *do* something, and it's something I've not seen with other events that, in their time and place, *should* have caused the same level of outrage we see now.

I also agree that this is a generation-marking event for Millennials, who as you say have up to now been groomed by Boomers, but not had a shocking event of this nature to galvanize them.

Actually, I think that the Millenials had their galvanizing event long before the rest of us did. Most of them have been living in fear of their lives being stripped away instantly and for no good reason ever since Columbine.

Prior to his attack, ask anyone school-age what changed their outlook on the world, and most of them would prolly cite Columbine as the incident.

Most of my familial generation are Millenials (with a few exceptions like myself), and I know that after Columbine happened they arrived at school daily with the same feelings we now have when we watch a plane fly overhead, or hear of some madman in a subway "spraying something."

Certainly they'll be *more* affected by the WTC Attack, but they have already had their galvanizing and transforming event. Something that most of us thought was a tragedy, but it did not affect our outlook on life in the same way that it did for them.

I kinda agree with you. However, Columbine probably affected the parents more than the kids themselves. Columbine began to galvanize the generation. Seattle WTO helped even more. E2K was a large event. But the difference between 911 and earlier events is that 911 marked their entry into young adulthood, just as the March 2000 stock market crash marked the Xer entry into midlife. Plus, 911 was a turning change.

As horrendous as this attack was we are fortunate that the terrorists executed a 3T attack. An attack on symbols of U.S. wealth and power. It truly would have been a 4T Pearl Harbor-like event if, for instance, they had crashed the hijacked jets into critical points of our national electrical distribution grid.

I don't really see the attack as one on "symbols of U.S. wealth and power." I found it to be much more personal than that -- an attack on civilian people. People just like you and me.

While I think "they" are justifying the attacks as what you said, I don't think that's the same perception a lot of Americans had.

Personally, if they had attacked the power grid as you mentioned above, I don't think we would have had the all out reaction that we have seen so far. I suspect we would have had a reaction similar to those we had with the initial WTC attack, and with the embassy, barrak and Cole bombings. We would have shrugged our shoulders and sent in a few cruise missles. And affected nothing.

Becuase you can't go anywhere in America right now without knowing someone who was personally affected by the events of Sept. 11th, I think the nerve has been struck.

Whatever the purpose of hitting those targets, the truth is that most people don't see the buildings and the institutions that were struck, they see the people who are dead.

How can you compare previous terrorist attacks to this one? Are you saying that your reaction to this event is the same as your reaction to the USS Cole attack, or to the 1983 Lebanon truck bomb?

It does seem to be very 3T when people are saying that this is another terrorist attack and that we must go after those responsible and bring them to justice, like Osama bin Laden was another John Wayne Gacy.

Well, the new mood seems to be deepening. It is not letting up at all. Here is an article from a terrorist expert:

<font color="blue">Terrorism expert knows the score

By Tara McKelvey, USA TODAY

People who are bent on mass destruction are usually not coy about their intentions. Hitler laid out his plans in Mein Kampf, which was published more than seven years before his rise to power in 1933. And Jessica Stern, a Harvard University terrorism expert, says Osama bin Laden also made it clear what he planned to do before the Sept. 11 hijackings occurred. "He said he would kill American civilians. He said a hundred Americans would die for every one who died in the U.S. attack on Afghanistan in August 1998. He also said if the U.S. government kills him, then 100 Osamas would take his place," says Stern, 43, a lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. She also is the author of The Ultimate Terrorists (Harvard University Press, 1999) and the upcoming Terror in the Name of God.

"It's important to try and stop him," Stern says of bin Laden. And she should know. She has gotten to know one of the leaders of a terrorist group that has pledged allegiance to bin Laden's al-Qa'eda organization and has seen how committed they are to their cause. In addition, she has spent the past four years interviewing terrorists in Israel, the Palestinian territories, Indonesia, Lebanon, India and the USA for her new book.

"It probably seemed like an eccentric way to spend one's life," she says. But Stern is a policy wonk with nerve. She also may be the only one ever to have been portrayed in a Hollywood movie by Nicole Kidman, who played a character based on Stern in the 1997 DreamWorks film The Peacemaker. After the film opened, Stern made a brief appearance on the national scene. She was profiled in Vogue and Newsweek, and appeared on CBS' 60 Minutes.

Stern has had to draw on her media savvy and on her own inner strength to get through the past month. It has not always been easy. She was on a live National Public Radio show, The Connection, in a studio in Boston when the World Trade Center collapsed.

"It was incredibly traumatic," she says. "They had the TV on with no sound while we were on the air. You had to sort of sound like a grown-up on the air."

Afterward, Stern returned to her office at Harvard to let her students ? especially the international ones ? know things would be OK for them on campus. It wasn't long before she was inundated with requests for TV and radio interviews. Luckily, Stern says, she was able to deliver a reassuring message.

Besides being well versed in extremist movements, Stern is an expert on "weapons of mass destruction." The Ultimate Terrorists is about the threat of terrorist attacks with biological, chemical and nuclear weapons, and she spoke about those dangers recently.

"I don't think people should stockpile gas masks," she says. "And the possibility of killing everyone in Washington, D.C., with anthrax is not likely. We learned something about al-Qa'eda's progress in developing unconventional weapons during the trials this spring in New York (for the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Africa).

"We know they were trying to buy uranium, and we know they had experimented with cyanide to kill a dog. But I've heard nothing that says they are capable of carrying out a doomsday scenario with an unconventional weapon.

"I think the more likely scenarios are low-tech," Stern says.

But, she adds, even low-tech efforts can result in massive destruction. As Stern points out, scientists have calculated that the explosive yield of the two jets that hit the World Trade Center was equal "to a one-half kiloton nuclear device."

The attack has galvanized those who are trying to ferret out intelligence on international terrorism. For her part, Stern is pulling together things she has learned for Terror in the Name of God, which will be published by Harvard University Press next year.

"I think it's important to read their manifestos," says Stern, describing her research on extremists. "It's worth listening to them."

These days, hardly anyone would consider that an eccentric way to spend one's days.</font>

I watched Bush's press conference tonight, after a long stretch of "resting up" from media intake. To be absolutely honest, I had my emotional reaction from the moment I heard about WTC and for 3 days afterwards, and it was an incredibly strong reaction, which is why I immediately sensed a shift to the 4T (Marc Lamb's criticism of "feelings" non-withstanding).

But since then, I have actually felt LESS emotion than those around me apparently feel. Instead, I feel quiet resolve. I will not attain the same level of emotion without another attack, and obviously hope I will not.

The next big emotion for me and others might well be fear. I have not been afraid, for some reason, about flying. I look at that in a rational way. The fear I'm talking about will be the same sort of fear that spread through my community last year when three high-schooler died from a rare virus. Something that will strike fear in communities around the country, making the WTC and Pentagon strikes seem smaller by comparison, as strange as that seems.

It's been said that there are but two true motivators: self-interest and fear. (Well, for those of us with kids, we know it's not as limited as just that -- unless you go overboard in defining what constitutes self-interest.)

The 3T was the peak of self-interest. The era will truly shift when this is subservient to fear, which is the true quality of a history-bending era, a 4T.

As I once said, 3T = "No Fear", and 4T = "Know Fear".


Someone asked Bush whether America could go "back to normal". If I had been the one answering the question, I would have said that no, we can't; instead we must go "forward to normal". In the process, the "normal" will have changed (and will come under attack in the next 2T).

Mike Alexander writes, "How can you compare previous terrorist attacks to this one? Are you saying that your reaction to this event is the same as your reaction to the USS Cole attack, or to the 1983 Lebanon truck bomb?"

I remember the 1983 incident very well. Back then Columbus (Ohio) had two newspapers: one a morning daily called the Citizen Journal, the other called the Evening Dispatch. The former was pretty liberal, while the latter very conservative.

In the aftermath of the the "Lebanon truck bomb," the Journal ran a cartoon on the op-ed page of a close-up pic of a G.I. with a medal pinned to his chest. The medal was that of an image of a duck.

My reaction to it was swift and clear: "Cancel my subscription!" Within eighteen months the over one hundred year-old institution called the Columbus Citizen Journal ceased to exist as a newspaper publication.

Go figure, huh?

On 2001-10-11 19:42, Marc Lamb wrote:


I remember the 1983 incident very well. Back then Columbus (Ohio) had two newspapers: one a morning daily called the Citizen Journal, the other called the Evening Dispatch. The former was pretty liberal, while the latter very conservative.

In the aftermath of the the "Lebanon truck bomb," the Journal ran a cartoon on the op-ed page of a close-up pic of a G.I. with a medal pinned to his chest. The medal was that of an image of a duck.

My reaction to it was swift and clear: "Cancel my subscription!" Within eighteen months the over one hundred year-old institution called the Columbus Citizen Journal ceased to exist as a newspaper publication.

Go figure, huh?

Was the cartoon meant to mock the G.I.s, or to point out that they had been left out there as 'sitting ducks'? The way you describne it, I don't see it as being inherently offensive. Was the cartoonist mocking the soldiers or the U.S. policy that placed them in harm's way for no gain and with no protection?

Was President Bushs'remark (joke) tonight about watching out for strangers renting crop dusters..3 or 4 T?

<center> :grin: :grin: :grin:

<font size="6" color="red">This is the 1000th post in this forum!!</font>

:grin: :grin: :grin: </center>

_________________
Robert Reed III (1982)
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"Life is not a cancer of matter; it is matter's transcendence of itself." - John S. Lewis
"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." - Einstein



<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: madscientist on 2001-10-11 23:19 ]</font>

From the ashes of September 11th arise the manly virtues. --- Peggy Noonan

http://www.opinionjournal.com/column...n/?id=95001309

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Josh Braxon on 2001-10-12 07:48 ]</font>