Descriptive Essay

            
            
             When the Challenger space shuttle blew up. Students gathered in the student lounge for hours, watching in disbelief. In a way, it was more existential than September 11. We watched the same ten seconds of the shuttle explosion over and over again, without they"re being a trace of the Shuttle anywhere in the world. That day was a technological disaster, a mechanical disaster that Americans, in our inimical fashion, could quickly fix. .
             What students watched on September 11, 2001 was a social and political disaster. Watching the events unfold was a lot less existential and a lot more practical because it is a disaster that will have a far greater impact on their world-and they, in turn, can affect that impact.
             In the next months and years, we as a society will rethink everything from privacy to business organizations to architecture. Businesses will look at Morgan Stanley's experience-occupying much of the World Trade Center-and think again about the virtues of further decentralization of operations. Just as architecture in the 1970s seemed to respond to the turmoil of the 1960s (consider the fortress-like administration building at the University of Michigan or the FBI building in Washington), we may see architecture change in the future. Aside from a defiant impulse to rebuild the World Trade Center itself, perhaps we will want smaller buildings-that are easier to evacuate and not as self-promotingly visible. Perhaps we will insist, despite what our engineers tell us, that big buildings be built stronger. Consider that when an admittedly lighter, slower plane (a B-25 bomber traveling at about 200 mph) crashed into the Empire State Building in 1945, that majestic skyscraper sustained relatively little damage.
             But most of our rethinking will concern law-how we will balance understandable demands for improved security with our right to privacy, our freedom to travel, our free speech, our policy of welcoming immigrants, and our commitment to a tolerant society.