s retaliation against terrorism. Others believe that it was an act of solidarity in favor of neighboring countries that would no doubt be affected by this conflict. However, the chain of events that followed September 11, 2001, demonstrated not only the unpredictability of this new era of war technology readiness, but also the speed at which events of this nature can unfold. The attack on the World Trade Center also magnified how destructive terrorists with a purpose can be, and how vulnerable the United States really is to the threats of the 21st Century.
             To explain the purpose of war is to uncover a world of responses. No one really has a full grasp of the reasoning behind a country going to war with another. Nation leaders can debate indefinitely in order to come up with a suitable justification to go to a foreign country and wreak havoc, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent bystanders.
             From a sociological point of view, "we are at a truly dramatic time in history for considering global social change" (Schaefer 2002). In her presidential address to the American Sociological Association, Maureen Hallinan (1997) asked those present to consider several recent events, including the acts of terrorism against the United States that were referred to earlier in this piece, the collapse of communism, the revolution and famine in Africa and Eastern Europe, the spread of AIDS, and the computer revolution. We should not forget the recent advances in genetic technology, which began with the cloning of a complex animal, Dolly the sheep (Schaeffer 2002).
             Hallinan did caution that as a nation, we "need to move beyond the restrictive models of social change – the linear view of evolutionary theory and the assumptions about equilibrium within functionalist theory." Like Maureen Hallinan, other sociologists have considered the "chaos theory" developed by mathematicians to consider the possibilit...