1. September 11
"Nine-Eleven” has become a shorthand reference to the shocking day when four hijacked airliners crashed into the World Trade Center’s twin towers, into a side of the Pentagon and into a field in Pennsylvania—bringing to the U.S. numbing, outrageous examples of the terrorist mayhem that much of the world has experienced in the past. It was a nine-one-one call that shook America’s sense of security.
Securing the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness has always required balancing issues of security—the protection of life—with issues of freedom. It has also provoked differing interpretations of the pursuit of happiness, from the libertarian stress on the individual’s pursuit of happiness, which is now generally ascendant in the U.S., to more communitarian ideals that once found expression in codes of conduct for media communications and blue laws. Throughout U.S. history, the relationship among these basic rights has always been fluid and revisable.