Life after 9/11.

• Position: Editor's Note - Editorial

I GREW UP in the giant shadow of the World Trade Center. Born in Brooklyn, I was raised in Middletown, New Jersey--a commuter town that lost almost 50 people on 9/II. My father worked for a shipping company that was one of the center's original tenants, and I myself worked and lived in the city for several years. I now live 500 miles away from Manhattan, but like millions of Americans, I spent that horrific September morning frantically checking on friends and relatives.

It is a measure of the attacks' magnitude that virtually everyone I've talked with in the past year has a close connection to 9/II. Depending on how the situation in Iraq, the crisis in the Middle East, and a number of other things play Out, 9/II may well end up as the defining event of the 21st century, though perhaps not in the way we might have first expected.

I firmly agree with Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul, who recently said, "The idea of [the terrorists'] strength is an illusion....The terrorists can fly a plane, but what they can't do is build a plane. What they can't do is build those towers." The conflict between the liberal West and reactionary elements in Islam has already been ugly, and it may continue for years or even decades. But the outcome is hardly in question:The system that delivers greater material wealth and greater personal freedom will triumph.

Yet the exact long-term effects of 9/II are far from clear. Like everyone else, we at reason have spent much of the past year trying to make sense of the attacks and their aftermath. In dozens of pieces for the magazine and reason online, we've explored the role of anti-Western "Occidentalism" in the attacks; analyzed how 9/II has altered American cultural identity; detailed how "vulgar" culture has liberated Islam and the West...