It is altogether appropriate to place the World Trade Center disaster at the center of any inquiry into the meaning of collective trauma in the contemporary age. The disaster symbolizes the new violence of the twenty-first century. Some mutter snidely that it is hype to say the World Trade Center disaster changed everything. They are wrong, in part because of the scale of the death that occurred, in part due to the form of the dying, and in part due to the psychological shock of the experience.

The scale of the death is gripping. 2,749 people died in the towers in New York (not counting 10 hijackers), 179 at the Pentagon (not including 5 hijackers), and 40 in the plane in Pennsylvania (not including 4 hijackers). We live with that horror, though the accurate counting of victims was for many months a moving target with confusing consequences. On 9/11 itself the media assumed the death toll would reach 20,000, given the number of those who might have been expected to be in the towers. That number quickly dropped to about 6,000, where it remained for nearly a month, because in the chaos of the rescue and recovery operations at Ground Zero and the general confusion in the city, no one was comparing overlapping lists. Each month or so after that another thousand was shaved off the total.