Nine Eleven

A Reflection

It’s hard to fathom that 9/11 was 21 years ago, a fact my mind has been grappling with since last year’s anniversary. In some ways, the feelings and images of that morning are still so visceral that, surely, it couldn’t have been more than a few short years ago. Three, maybe four. And in other ways equally baffling, it feels like several lifetimes separate us from that Tuesday morning. As though the world where 9/11 happened couldn’t possibly be same world where 2022 is happening.

Time is strange like that. It’s a funhouse mirror of perception, distorting you and everything around you. It makes some details liquid and malleable. Lines blur over time into funny unnamable shapes. Like what happened in my little 12 year-old life later that Tuesday? Did we go to any of our classes? Did we get released early? Did they cancel school? I simply don’t remember.

And while some things blur in the wake of time’s current, others become razor sharp. “Patrick! There was an attack on the Pentagon!” I can still hear Rachel Corbin’s panicked 7th grader voice two decades later. Embarrassingly, I remember my follow-up thought, Well that sucks for Egypt I guess. In a few short minutes I would learn exactly where and what the Pentagon was. I would also learn every minute detail about two buildings that were a thousand miles away from my small existence in St. Louis, Missouri.

Every classroom at McKinley Classical Junior Academy had a giant TV perched on a cart and by 9 a.m. CST every single one of those TVs was turned on. Mrs. Stevenson was already glued to hers as I walked in the room. I can see her in my mind, on the edge of her desk, much like the TV on the cart, with her arms crossed over her chest. Frozen. Staring. I saw what she saw on the screen as I drifted over to my seat.

A plane. A building. Another plane. Another building. Eventual collapse.

I can still feel those alternating waves of fear and confusion. This thing was scary but I din’t know why. This was bad but I didn’t know how bad. What did it all mean? In those early minutes of coverage there were so few details. Not that they would help anything. Because as details emerged, nothing seemed any clearer. In the meantime, we had the clips. The same ones. Over and over and over again. A hamster wheel of terror.

We were watching death on repeat. That much I knew. It wasn’t subtle death. It wasn’t small death. It was Big death. Death on a scale that remains incomprehensible. We watched it on a loop with 12 year-old eyes and spongy 12 year-old brains, not realizing we were also watching the birth of a 24-hour news cycle addiction.

It didn’t help matters that no one, not the principal or Mrs. Stevenson or any grown-up, could explain what was happening. It’s scary to see something scary but it’s really scary to see grown-ups be scared. Looking back I realize some of those teachers at McKinley were younger than I am now. I can’t imagine being in my 20s with a room full of frightened middle schoolers staring up at me waiting for answers. Waiting on bated breath for you to say something resembling a cure, or even just a balm. But 9/11 was the great equalizer in that way. Everyone, teacher and student, were forced to huddle together in the same lifeboat of confusion. Not unlike global pandemics I suppose.

What’s really struck me recently is that even after 21 years, with all the perspective and clarity that time delivers, we will never know the full scope of that collective trauma. How could we? There were no objective set of eyes that day. No one “missed” that news cycle. No one was on vacation that week and simply returned to their life unaffected. No one was spared. We can’t know what our world would look like without that Tuesday morning.

Like all events of magnitude, there’s an imprint on a whole generation. While everyone was affected, what did 9/11 do to my generation specifically? What did it do to spongy adolescent Millennial brains to watch terror on repeat before our frontal cortexes were even done cooking? The 7th graders were definitely watching. Were the 5th graders? 3rd graders? What did it do to those even farther away from puberty? It’s unknowable.

What really shocks me now is the idea that there are people in this country who can vote and drink and go into the military and buy houses and pay taxes who were not alive when the towers fell. To them 9/11 was a bad thing that happened before they took their first breath. What does it mean to them? Is it the same as Vietnam is to me? Or Pearl Harbor? Or the Civil War? In the context of my life, those things could have happened thousands of years ago or minutes before I came to be. It’s all the same.

But what about those that came after? Gen Z. I think about them a lot too. They were born into a world already shaped and molded by the attacks. It’s in the air in which they were raised, the soil and water and trees. It’s touched every facet of their lives without their ever knowing it. They’ve never known travel or education or culture or politics beyond the shadow of those looming towers. They grew up in an America built by terror. To them it’s just the world as it’s always been.

Perhaps that was the endgame all along. Perhaps this, this moment right here and now 21 years later, is the dystopia that those men from other side of the world envisioned for us. Maybe 9/11 had nothing to do with towers and planes and a singular moment. Maybe it was just a plot to hand unseeable, unknowable terror to generations yet to be. Perhaps they wanted nothing more than to burden future people, to gift them a world that’s a little bit worse, a little less safe. Looking around at the state of things today, it’s hard to think those angry men didn’t win.

And yet.

We’re here.

There’s a case to be made that our existence is resistance. Not that ceaseless, expensive, vanity war we ended up in immediately following the attacks. But our standing here, battered and bruised, is the defiance against the generational tyranny handed to us. It’s a symbol of the thing those men thought they could squash. We put our feet one in front of the other, not realizing that’s a small pulse on the heart rate monitor of something that was supposed to be dead.

As I look at Gen Z, those in 9/11’s wake, I feel the smallest sense of hope. This generation is rejecting so many bullshit things they were born into. They realize the fishbowl is just that, a container. They’re waking up to and breaking down systems of oppression and harm. Maybe that’s because their parents were still standing after terror had come and gone. They’re resilient because they saw resilience, whether knowingly or unknowingly.

And that’s life I suppose. We grow up in a world shaped by others - their terror and their joy. Then we have the great honor and responsibility to decide if that’s truly the world we want. More importantly we are charged with asking, is it the world we want to hand to those yet to come? It’s all a circle. It always has been. No amount of terror and destruction can break that circle. Not wars, not pandemics, not terrorist attacks. I hope that on this 21st anniversary we may be reminded of that. All of us.