A reader quotes me:
“I’d say our reaction is less about narcissism than a collective form of PTSD stemming from 9/11.” Any “collective form of PTSD” from 9/11 is, itself, a symptom of the narcissism Perlstein is describing. There are people for whom PTSD from that event is perfectly reasonable and to be expected. But in a country of 300 million, they are a tiny, tiny fraction. For the overwhelming majority of Americans who say things like “9/11 changed everything,” Perlstein is absolutely right.
Even with the loss of 2500 lives and the spectacular nature of the attack itself, 9/11 was an extremely small, extremely localized event for a country as large (in every sense) and powerful as the U.S. There’s absolutely no reason it should have caused anything resembling “a collective form of PTSD.” There’s absolutely no reason it should have “changed everything.”
In fact, it didn’t. We “changed everything,” and we did it because too many of us overdramatized our own experience of an event that, had we not heard about it on the news, would not have caused so much as a ripple in 95% of Americans’ lives.
I don’t mean to be harsh. Once somebody has worked themselves into a panic over something, the panic is real and so are the feelings that flow from it. But it is the case that we worked ourselves into that panic. And our panic is what enabled the ongoing Bush-Cheney disaster – the “everything” that changed.
(Video: The National Anthem at the first Boston Bruins game following Monday’s tragedy)
The Dish 