This space was going to be filled this morning with a column about the euro, and the latest proposals by the French premier and the German Chancellor to tame currency speculators. Something like that. In truth, I no longer recall exactly what it was about.
The editor tactfully suggested that although the column might well have been a finely argued piece of writing, it would no longer hit the right note. On a morning such as this, no one is interested in the finer points of the euro. Darker, more somber thoughts fill our minds.
In that judgment, he is, of course, completely right. It's called perspective. It is the one thing we still have, should try to hold onto, and which whoever perpetrated Tuesday's shocking attacks on New York City and Washington has completely abandoned.
Many different judgments will be delivered on these attacks, almost all of them by people far more qualified and expert than myself, but one seems impossible to quarrel with. Whatever point those terrorists were trying to prove, it was surely not worth the terrible loss of life involved. No point ever is.
The terrorist attack on the US prompts three different reflections.
One, it reminds of us how fragile is the infrastructure in which we live. We build skyscrapers and airplanes because they are useful and practical. We give little thought to how the enemies of a free society may turn its technology against us. As we build new computers systems, new banking centers, new superjumbos, and so on, we should remember that technology makes us richer, but it also makes us more vulnerable to attack. We build the weapons with which they kill us.
Two, it reminds that us that in a globalized, networked world, everything is connected. An attack on the World Trade Center and on the Pentagon is an attack on the entire world. The sense of shock and the sorrow over the loss of life will be felt as keenly in London or Frankfurt or Hong Kong as it is throughout America. New York is the world's most global city, the processing and command center of the world's financial system. An attack upon that city can only be perceived as an attack on that system.
Its defense is a matter that should involve the entire world.
Three, it puts into context the ordinary, everyday events that obsess us. The market made all the usual moves it makes in times of crisis: it marked up the prices of gold, commodities and bonds, it shifted out of equities, it sold the dollar, and fled into other currencies. None of that seems very important, or can be anything more than the most short-term of reactions. Against the frailty and preciousness of innocent human life, most of the things that concern us appear small and insignificant.
We all disagree on things all the time. An event such as this reminds us that compared with the psychopaths who plotted this attack, we agree on just about everything. We should tuck that lesson away and remind ourselves of it next time we feel our voices rising or our pens sharpening.
Writing from London, the one thought worth offering to the citizens of New York is that there is a lot of ruin in a city.
None of the IRA attacks upon London during the 1970s and 1980s were ever on such a spectacular scale, nor involved such horrible loss of life.
Even so, IRA terrorists inflicted years of tragedy and inconvenience. But the rubble of every bomb was always cleared, the dust washed down, and new buildings sprung up in the place of those that had been destroyed. The life of the city went on. The spirit of New York will remain undimmed, and her people unbowed, no matter what trials might be put in their way.
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