When the space shuttle Challenger exploded. Students gathered in the student lounge for hours, watching in disbelief. In some ways, it was more existential than 9/11. We watched the same ten seconds of the Shuttle explosion over and over again, with no sign of the Shuttle anywhere in the world. That day was a technological disaster, a mechanical disaster that the Americans, in our hostile way, could have quickly remedied. What the students saw on September 11, 2001 was a social and political disaster. Watching events unfold was much less existential and much more practical because it is a disaster that will have a much greater impact on their world and they, in turn, can influence that impact. In the coming months and years, we as a society will rethink everything from privacy to business organizations to architecture. Businesses will consider the experience of Morgan Stanley, which occupied much of the World Trade Center, and rethink the virtues of further decentralizing operations. Just as the architecture of the 1970s seemed to respond to the turbulence of the 1960s (consider the fortress-like administration building at the University of Michigan or the FBI building in Washington), we may see changes in the architecture in the future. A...... middle of paper ...... under siege" only because there were armed military personnel in the city. For those who lived in places through prolonged periods of terrorism like Paris during some of the 1990s 80 or long periods of time in Jerusalem: This seems like an exaggeration. A civilized, democratic society like ours, with rich procedural protections and robust civil rights, can only survive one thing that a civilized society cannot survive: the words of political philosopher John Rawls "If we want to remain free and equal citizens, we cannot afford a general retreat into private life, not on September 11, not tomorrow, not ever.".