Through all of my life thus far I have arrived at the conclusion that it is better to live in my own time than any.... Through all of my life thus far I have arrived at the conclusion that it is better to live in my own time than any other. Today I am not so sure.

As a teenager I visited New York, rode to the top of the Empire State Building and looked at the city with wonder. Returning, the look at the skyline was still beautiful, but scarred by reality.

The obvious reality is the absent twin towers. Even if they were there, little has appeared in the skyline--certainly no monumental building--since my first visit. I had to wonder if the tourists visiting today were posing in front of monuments to commercial modernism or ancient relics. I fear we are moving into a time and place when vistas like this seem strangely unfamiliar.

Before I get into politics, let me say New York is still full of energy and many new buildings, though smaller, have been built. Yet, compare that to Shanghai where nearly 3,000 buildings over 18 stories tall have sprouted and an additional 2,000 are planned or under construction. The world's tallest building is now, at least briefly, in Taipei. The new World Trade Center will add a monumental building, but did it have to take such a tragic event to muster up the energies needed to build?

With or without buildings, I'm afraid the fundamentalism in the middle east and the attack of 9-11 has led to a new fundamentalism here. I fear we will regress as a society and spend the next part of our history clinging to our religions, huddling in our tribal units and existing on the mental and physical capital of the past--represented here in the New York skyline.

I can only hope we don't have to wait decades or centuries for a new age--I hope a better age can start before the capital left for us runs out. I hope we can spark that renaissance before there are few left to throw Bibles and Korans at. Once the light dims, it could be gone forever, or, perhaps many years later people come to see what's left of these monuments to capitalism and progress and realize that they didn't always exist, it was we who created them, and we were not divided by fundamentalism, but we were united for progress and achievement. We, today, must leave this blinding and dangerous cave and build.