Symposium: What I miss most about pre-9/11 America

While it is somewhat cliche to say that the “whole world changed” after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, it does not detract from the reality of the statement. In numerous tangible ways, the culture, security, and politics of the nation were never the same after al-Qaida hijackers in passenger planes left nearly 3,000 people dead in smoldering ruins across lower Manhattan, the Pentagon, and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. For many of us who lived through it all, a quarter century has passed in a blink, while at the same time the pre-9/11 Washington era paradoxically seem