I honestly didn't think EVERYTHING would be destroyed so quickly.
How rapid it was shocks me as well, and how encompassing of the West, I think it was mass communication that put modern man into the hands of a few 10s of thousands of people (of largely the more lacking of the more noble qualities), mass education, mass publishing, mass movies, mass TV, mass advertising, tied in with the scatterings of townspeople and families to great distances from their original ties.
Did anybody ever think they'd see the day that a pope would condemn a president of the United States and then open a prayer room for muslims in the Vatican and never say a negative word about them hanging eight women.