Creative destruction probably pre-dates Noah’s biblical flood, or the possibly catastrophic extinction of the dinosaurs, but I’ve seen the term itself used since Marx and Schumpeter coined it. Eggs need to be broken to make an omelette, or anything revolutionarily different from its antecendents.
Many, in all seriousness, including myself, tagged 9/11 the same way – see the footnote on every page of my blog. I noticed that Voltaire’s outlook on life, and much of 18th century enlightenment, was markedly affected by the Lisbon Earthquake.
What with the US Politics and Religion, Globalisation and Oil, Palestine and Iraq, etc as centre stage subjects everywhere since 9/11, might I possibly hope that the Indian Ocean Tsunami proves as creative as it was biblically destructive, in getting western hypocritical, self-interested agendas off the front page for a while.
I guess the problem with 9/11, in this respect, was that those most affected (beyond those immediately involved, dead and bereaved) were those least interested in learning the lesson. William Barrett said “Man is willing to learn about himself only after some disaster. What he learns has always been there [and] it is no less true for having come out of a period of chaos and disaster.”