Beyond the intangible policies and attitudes of Americans, the prime weakness in our reaction to terrorism can be found in our fetish for overly designed and contrived monuments. New York City is embarking on a project to "rebuild" the World Trade Center area in a fashion that is everything but stoic determination. In 2001, a group of terrorists decided to, amongst many other things, permanently change the skyline of America's largest city. For some reason, our reaction was to go with their redesign plan, merely employing our architects to add that Disney touch everyone seems to desire.

Now, design critiques are subjective, and not the main point here. The new buildings in New York will be beautiful to some, ugly to others. However, the underlying attitude and message is the important piece. Would not the most resolute reaction have been to simply rebuild the twin towers- of course using the most modern structural and security processes- in the same slab-by-slab image as the ones the terrorists knocked down?

Sure, stoicism is not generally exciting. Stoicism doesn't make for good television, nor does it inspire an outpouring of emotional patriotism. What it does do, however, is to prevent a culture from remaining rattled and affected forever- lingering on past pain for decades.

You see, gushing displays and lingering pain are the definition of terrorism's goal. The weapons used by terrorists are not car bombs and hijacked planes- rather, it's the intangible terror. The real casualties of terrorist attacks are not the unfortunate passengers on a bombed train- the casualties are our resilience and stoicism.