There are times when nothing very interesting seems to happen, when the years fly by like one of the uneventful periods in the history book that connect one war to another. Of course, as Americans learned on Sept. 11, 2001, it is those uneventful and uninteresting periods of history that provide a superior quality of life for those actually living through them. It may be tedious for future historians to read of people living peacefully for year after year in prosperity, but no sane individual would prefer the excitement of famine, chaos and war to comfortable boredom.