: A hijacked passenger jet, American Airlines Flight 11 out of Boston, Massachusetts, crashes into the north tower of the World Trade Center, tearing a gaping hole in the building and setting it afire. 9:03 a.m.: A second hijacked airliner, United Airlines Flight 175 from Boston, crashes into the south tower of the World Trade Center and explodes. Both buildings are burning. 9:43 a.m.: American Airlines Flight 77 crashes into the Pentagon, sending up a huge plume of smoke. Evacuation begins immediately."(CNN.com). The terrorist carefully chose these targets because they knew it would send a certain message or meaning to the American government and it's people, as well other nations and their people. "Symbolic interactionism begins with the assumption that much of human behavior is determined not by the objective facts of a situation but by the meanings people ascribe to a situation." (Gelles and Levine 72). In the following pages I will examine the meanings attached to these targets and why different groups around the world reacted differently to these events.
The fact that all of these flights found their origins in the continental United States was the first big message to which Americans all have assigned meaning. Traditionally terrorism has always had an overseas connation, which has provided a sense of security among many Americans. In hijacking American jets on American soil we now see how vulnerable we are, and in reality, how vulnerable we have always been. It's very clear that our sense of security has been a false one indeed. When Americans take this to heart and understand the true and real danger it represents, it evokes great fear, and is quite paralyzing. The attackers, the "evildoers", take great delight in Americans coming to this realization. One affect of the fear is people simply are not traveling via air routes as before, we have been robbed of our mobility, a benchmark of the American lifestyle.