I saw a bunch of people on Facebook yesterday, middle aged people, lamenting that "our children have to grow up in such a rotten world." I didn't intervene in any of the conversations, but all logic says that their kids are growing up in a pretty damn safe world. It's funny how quickly everyone has forgotten about "Duck and Cover", the skyrocketing murder rates of the 1980s, and the fact that terrorism has been a thing for many decades now. If we need proof that terrorism has at its core little more than media hype, we need only look to Oklahoma City, which killed close to 200 people, many of whom were children in a day care center housed there. In that case, all we could do was prosecute the responsible individuals. There was no war to fight for it, so it went away quietly (and efficiently, as I can't remember the last time I heard the term "Michigan Militia" 'round here). Crime is down, but the media is up. That's the main difference. Personally, I think it's sad that our children have to grow up in a world dominated by 24 hour news.
Our culture cannot frame a world in which there is no "enemy" because we've had one since the earliest beginnings of our history. As such, the crime of terrorism is reframed as the war of ideas. You're absolutely right - if we'd treated the 2001 attack on the WTC the way we'd treated the 1993 attack on the WTC, the world would be a very different place indeed.