Pin it

Everyone has a story about where they were when the first plane hit on 9/11. Everyone, that is, who was alive and an adult on September 11, 2001. Here’s mine, not that it matters much.

Where I Was on 9/11

The TV was on in the bedroom of my college house as I was preparing to leave for class. 8:45am, Katie Couric’s voice in the background. The side window of my room overlooked a fairly busy intersection that crossed over right near the football field at Carnegie Mellon University—a prime location for a college house, within spitting distance of campus but officially “off”—so I was always glancing out of it to gauge foot traffic. So the news hit my ears before my eyes. The anchor said something strange had happened at the World Trade Center.

Here’s the part that’s going to sound really strange to anyone who wasn’t processing this day as an adult. No one really thought anything was wrong wrong when that first plane struck. It was awful, yes. Instantly and deeply tragic. But I really think we thought it—“it” being the first event in a terrible sequence—would stop there. Our collective failure to imagine anything worse was born of the relatively peaceful and prosperous era we’d grown up in. 

This was a generation shaped by the Dot-Com Boom, whose biggest worry was a massive computer outage at 12:00am on January 1, 2000. War and existential threat simply did not factor into our collective consciousness, not at least for my generation. We were rolling down the grassy hills of postwar peace. War stories were for our grandfathers.

At 8:46, the plane crashing into the side of a building that was an emblem of American capitalism was an accidental tragedy; by 9:03, when the second plane hit, it was unmistakably an attack.

And that’s the crazy part that you hear all of us who lived through this talk about to this day—the mental whiplash of it all. Within 17 minutes you are both a kid growing up in a prosperous America, where wars lived in dusty history books, and then an adult realizing you had just stepped into one.

September 12th and the Days Following the Attacks

In the days after the attacks—after we all walked around in a daze and questioned how did we get here to very few satisfactory answers—I started up my subscription to the New York Times. News was always an interest of mine, but now, I needed to know every detail of what we were discovering about the people who had ripped our peace from us. I thought I could work backwards to piece together what it was we had all missed for so long that could have brought us here, to this terrible moment.

To do so, collected obituaries of the people who died that day, carefully cutting them out of the Times daily and saving them in a notebook. I didn’t do this ironically or out of a need to preserve history. I wanted to see their faces; I wanted to know what their favorite restaurants were. How they proposed to their wives. The number of kids they had. How their dream job had always been working in the Twin Towers!

Three thousand was too big a number to process at once; I wanted to understand them one at a time.

Just two years later, my days working in local TV news would take me to the site of the Flight 93 plane crash in Shanksville, PA—the plane that was believed to be headed for Washington, DC, whose passengers bravely mounted a revolt to take it down before it could hit its intended target and whose memories live on in deserved valor for it.

I first saw that Shanksville crash site for what it was moments before that terrible crash—a quiet, green, remote field situated in an otherwise rural area right outside of Pittsburgh. When they removed the debris, and before the installation of the memorial, it was a hauntingly distorted version of its former self—a green tract whose rolling, Western Pennsylvanian curves had been dug into, chopped, chunked out by burning metal’s collision with the soft earth. A Monet clumsily turned into a Picasso.

I interviewed the families. Those poor people whose loved ones perished at the site where we stood, crying, still trying to make sense of what would come next.

What Came After 9/11

What came next, of course, was war. 

First Afghanistan, less than a month after the attacks, then Iraq. 

Weapons of Mass Destruction—or “WMD’S,” three letters that simultaneously became the most pervasive and divisive acronym of our time. (In case you missed the ending, we never found any.) Saddam Hussein captured, tried, hanged. Abu Ghraib. An insurgency. American casualties mounting, along with Iraqi ones. A war that began with broad public support but ended with confusion, a mental health crisis in American troops, and a loss of trust in our government.

Then, there were the day-to-day changes: longer security lines at airports, taking our shoes off to go through security, the Patriot Act, the sense that there was always another attack around the corner, and the news that sometimes we even thwarted them.

The Iraq War formally ended in 2011, only for American forces to return as ISIS swept through the region. The military operation in Afghanistan stretched across four presidencies and ended with some of the most heart-rending images this whole historical chapter has seen: American troops pulling out so rapidly that Afghan mothers, terrified at the thought of a Taliban takeover, literally handed their babies over an airport wall to American soldiers. Good God.

Now, 25 Years Later

We are here, 25 years after 9/11, and I don’t know if we are better or worse for what we’ve done since those towers fell.

I do know we are different. I’m puzzling out how, exactly, but let’s work some thoughts through together, right here.

I’m not sure we are as ferocious about protecting Western values today as we were on September 12, 2001. To be honest, I wonder whether people think America is still a country worth protecting.

I do.

Everything hurt so much on September 12, 2001, because we still believed that what had been destroyed, what had been broken—we still believed that the country, and the values that underpin it, were worth protecting. 

And let’s not be obtuse about what, exactly, had been attacked—in addition to the physical structures, of course. The target wasn’t just steel and glass; it was Western ideals.

Al Qaeda’s terrorism was not violence without an ideology. Destruction for the sake of destruction. It was, and remains, the product of a violent Islamist worldview that is openly hostile to the values of a free and pluralistic society—freedoms of speech and religion, women’s liberation and equality, the ability of people to live and love as they choose.

What We’ve Forgotten Since 9/11

This is what I fear we’ve forgotten.

I see kids marching on college campuses, chanting “Death to America.” I see protestors openly praising Hamas and other terror groups, treating civilian violence as an “understandable” expression of resistance. I see symbols and slogans once associated with explicitly anti-Western movements absorbed into protest culture with remarkably little curiosity about the ideologies behind them.

And I see the complete inversion of logic, where destruction is mistaken for liberation and the deliberate murder of citizens becomes something that we first have to contextualize before condemning it.

Dogmatic, reductive teachings on colonialism have overtaken American minds to the point where the only barometer of good vs. evil can be boiled down to “black vs. white.” We have lost nuance. But most unfortunately, we have lost the desire for it.

Oppressor and oppressed. Colonizer and colonized. Pray tell, whose ancestors—better yet, who of us that are currently alive—falls so perfectly into one side of any of these categories? The need to self-flagellate based on the depth of our melanin has quite literally taken over our collective brains.

This is the part I cannot get past.

Terrorism does not become something else when its victims are powerful. American. Israeli. Western. Deliberately slaughtering civilians—a concept Americans became painfully acquainted with on that bright, warm New York City morning in 2001—does not become liberation under any light, under any political belief system.

When we woke up on September 12th, we were very clear about what had happened. We had known without anyone telling us that something precious had been ripped away. And for all the mistakes we would make in response to it, we understood that what was attacked had been worth defending.

Twenty-five years later, I’m not sure we agree on that anymore.

Thank you for taking the time to read. I hope you’ll join me on Substack for more posts like this one.