9/11 certainly focused a lot of minds, was a terrible disaster for so many, and has led to so much, but.

Tens of millions of Americans did not lose their houses and/or their jobs as a result, and who knows how many Europeans similarly were impacted. That is generation attitude change when all you hold as truth and reality is suddenly swept away by a tide not of your making - how many people in the US and Europe suddenly found that they could not achieve their dreams becuase the money ran out and their were no jobs to be had?

Australia styles itself the "lucky country" and we escaped 95% of the effects of the GFC, but the news from the Northern Hemisphere has changed the attitudes of so many down here. We have become far more conservative, far more hard-working, far less relaxed and certainly far less certain of our individual place in all this.

I am not downplaying 9/11. Just like the assassination of JFK I remember where I was when I first heard, and have a visual memory of both the impacts and the aftermath. I lost two friends.