9/11 Remembrances (2026 Edition)

Facebook is used less and less from the digital meeting space it used to be, and also 9/11 remembrances are smaller. The motto is "Never Forget", but many of the fireman standing for the local ceremony must hardly have been born in 2001. What happens when no one is left to remember? Today I read the very excellent The Only Plane in the Sky by Garrett Graff; first person accounts from that day. I felt chills like I hadn't in a long time. Actually, in the chapter "The 9/11 Generation", one GWU student (seemingly a freshman in HOVA) was featured, Natasha Wright: "I will never forget how surreal it was returning to the dorm and turning the TVs on. Finding out the Pentagon had been hit. Watching Residents of the Watergate across the street from us be evacuated as we were on lockdown and couldn't leave. The panic began to spread; students on my floor cried together. Some residents packed bags to walk across the bridge and out of the city. Most of us sat in shock. I cried — a lot. We barely knew one another and we were instantly bonded." One day written words will be all that's left. I'm recording below the few Facebook postings from people that were in DC or NY that day. In earlier anniversaries there were more.

TW (GWU Class of 2003) It’s hard to believe it’s been 25 years since waking up on GW’s campus to hearing about the first plane hitting the tower, watching the second plane hit on live tv and then seeing smoke rising from the Pentagon from my dorm window. Rumors ran rampant about car bombs and a desperate struggle to find a working phone. I am so grateful to have found my closest friends on campus so we could navigate the day together. The images will never leave my mind. Never forget the hero’s and victims from that day.

SD (GWU Class of 2004) It’s hard to imagine 25 years have passed for a day that will be engrained in my memory forever. As a 20-year-old college student living blocks from the White House, a short ride from the Pentagon, the immense fear of that day - those hours - changed who I was and how I thought by life. Understanding we do not get to choose what happens in the next moment and relaying deeply on my faith is a lesson I learned at a young age. But it’s our duty to talk about that day. It’s a hard story to tell children, but we must. And while discussing with Tess the events of 9/11, as hard as that may be for a 10-year-old to hear, we also told her the stories of the heroes we saw that day - the first responders, the police officers and the innocent lives lost. And we also told her about the days that followed. The churches overflowing, the memorial services of every faith community joining together and the peaceful discussions with others comprehending this new world. We explained that even after those dark days, we saw peace, love and hope. I am grateful to live in a town that will never forget. Today we attended the dedication of a new memorial - remembering those who lost their lives that day and honoring our first responders for the job they did and continue to do every day. May we all never forget and continue to tell the story of the 9/11 heroes for generations to come.

EMP (GWU Class of 2003) 25 years ago I was a 20 year old college student in DC sleeping late because I never scheduled a class before 11. Somehow my Grandfather [...] was able to get through to my cell shortly after the second tower was hit. At the time we still didn't know where the third and fourth planes were, but figured they were coming my way. My dorm was only blocks from the White House and even closer to the State Department. I remember that fear like it was yesterday. Never forget.

AR (GWU Class of 2005) 25 years ago today, I was a freshman at GW, having moved away from home for the first time in my life, just about to turn 18 years old. Like many college freshman, I had a terrible schedule, including back-to-back classes starting at 8 AM— at least they were in the same building. after my first class, I went to the ground floor of the building to grab coffee from the coffee cart. As I was headed back into the elevator to go to my second class, my professor said that she heard something about planes in New York, but we had no idea what was going on. It was only about 9:20 AM and this was an age before social media and mass adoption of cell phones. As I sat on the third floor of the building, facing towards Northern Virginia for the next hour and fifteen minutes, I watched smoke rise from the Pentagon in the distance. After class, I headed straight back to my residence hall, but was told I had to report underground to the closest DC Metro stop because there was a bomb threat at the White House. My parents tried to call me for hours, but all of the phone lines were jammed. It was one of the most consequential, formative experiences in my life. I was already a little old for my age, but I felt I really had to grow up quickly that day. My heart goes out to the thousands of victims’ families, including all of the first responders and the countless many who suffered or continue to suffer health consequences in the aftermath.

BP (GWU Class of 2004) This year is the 25th anniversary of 9/11. I can’t sever my memories of this time from the death of Jon. I was still grieving, and then the most traumatic event of my life happened. 9/11, like the JFK assassination for the baby boomers, has been a defining event in my life. Being 19 years old, a sophomore in college in Washington, DC, it seems that every memory I have is timestamped as “before 9/11” or “after 9/11.” My college roommate at the time and I still text or call on the anniversary, as if to make sure we both recognize the trauma we went through together. Twenty-five years later, we still tell each other the same sarcastic joke she said to me on the way off to class. (The day was going to suck because our milk had gone bad.) When I got back from my 8 a.m. class and heard what was happening, I scrawled a note to my roommate to call her family and headed off to my next class. I was stopped in the hallway by the RA, who told me to go back to my room. My roommate came back and said she heard the plane hit the Pentagon while she was in class. She then sent for her hometown friend Peter to come stay with us because she felt better with a “man in the house.” A friend wanted me to go with her to Maryland to her family’s house, but I didn’t want to leave my dorm room because then my parents wouldn’t know where I was. The phone lines were down, and the internet was spotty. I’d learn later it was the only time my dad called my mom at work (she was a 4th grade teacher) and pulled her out of class. He wanted her to know what was happening, and they couldn’t get a hold of me. As we all know, it would take a long time to adjust to the new normal of post-9/11. I think that’s why it is so hard for me to believe 25 years have passed, because I can still put myself in my dorm room next to my roommate, watching the news on our little TV/VHS combo. Every station for days and days covered only 9/11. My grades that semester tanked. I was never good at chemistry, and I definitely didn’t have the bandwidth to deal with it then. And I took some terrible literature class, and the professor just talked about 9/11 for the rest of the semester, so I didn’t do great in that one either. We also fought to name the freshman dorm TV lounge after Jon, which took a fundraising campaign, and we didn’t see it created until we were juniors.

EM (Fordham Class of 2003) Today brings back a lot of difficult memories. I will never forget this day, or what it felt like being at Fordham when it happened. Some memories stay with us forever. 🤍

And lastly, myself, TJC (GWU Class of 2003) Right now I'm looking up at a perfectly clear blue sky. It's the same morning sky I remember 25 years ago in D.C., but with an unmistakable rising smoke plume to the SW. A haunting echo, that same blue snapping me back.

PS: KZ (Salve Regina Class of 2003) to my posting responded "It’s crazy how each year seems to have this same blue sky, sending us right back to those moments when all of the events unfolded on that day, instantly transported" to which I replied "Some memories stay. And it reminds us we were all together looking up at the same sky that day. Sending a hug!"

9/11: Twenty-Five Years Later

Twenty-five years ago to the minute of when I’m writing this, the World Trade Center towers had been hit by airplanes (the Pentagon was moments from being hit). I wanted to write my impressions of whether 9/11 changed everything, but, yesterday I was scooped by The New York Times (“Did 9/11 Really Change Everything?”) - I am sure the piece is better than anything I could write, so I purposefully avoided reading it.

Twenty-five years later, the events of that morning, me myself, and the country as a whole seem like a different lifetime ago. Today it feels like “did 9/11 change everything?” is an irrelevant question because things would have radically changed so much anyway. A.I. is the current anxiety, and it is sweeping away everything that was before, and would have whether 9/11 happened or not.

The events of 9/11 might have been the last time I can remember the country really coming together - I remember the deafening “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” chants, never more so I personally experience than during a GWU basketball pep rally that fall when some soldiers recreated the Iwo Jima flag raising: thousands of upper-middle class mostly suburban college kids would have ripped out Al-Qaeda’s eyeballs if they had been there. Nothing like that has happened since and it’s hard to imagine it happening now. The biggest thing to happen since, the COVID-19 pandemic and shutdowns drove us apart maybe irrevocably rather than unite us: there weren’t any “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” chants (maybe just sometimes performative daily applause for first responders, but even when genuine there was a different intensity than the post-9/11 bloodlust and circled-wagons strength).

Rudy Giuliani was for a short time “America’s Mayor” and now is widely loathed; George W. Bush was in a flimsy position given the 2000 election controversy, became never more America’s President when he gave the  “I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!” speech at Ground Zero on 9/14, became loathed during the Afghanistan/Iraq wars and civil liberties concerns (see: any episode of The Daily Show) but now, in the Trump years, seems to be seen by some as America’s jolly bumbling grandfather.

Technology has changed; 9/11 was the last major event before the smartphones. The documentation gaps in what went on in the hijacked planes or upper floors; it’s almost unimaginable today - if this happened now there would be running video and photos and calls and text. We were so much more removed from each other then. The nascent cell networks crashed that morning, as did websites like CNN for some time.

Twenty-five years ago was more than half my lifetime ago. In retrospect, I was a naive and cripplingly anxious 20 year old; or maybe I wasn’t, but I cringe to read some of my old reflections. A rumor from that morning was that planes had crashed into the National Mall and Old Executive Office Buildings; my reaction was some version of “huh, you don’t see that every day - once I get off my work shift I’m going to go check that out”. I feel like I should be ashamed that my first reaction to tragedy was to seek spectacle, like a driver slowing down to view the highway accident. That might be a little hard on myself, the whole country was glued to their sets. I was also very fatalistic at the time and resigned to the destruction of the city and myself. A key point in that morning was a former student, now working for the State Department, calling the office I was working and *screaming* to get out of the city immediately. The Metro was shut down, I had no car. I was going to steal a bike from across the street at the library and pedal for my life - I had daydream images of myself pedaling furiously across the Arlington Memorial Bridge just barely escaping the fireball blast like the president’s plane avoiding the aliens’ destruction in Independence Day. Some acquaintances had a car and were going to hightail it to the suburbs. Spending a week (or more?) trapped with them seemed like its own kind of torture, at least I hoped the city explosion would be brief. I was fairly calm that morning in spite of everything, I felt safe in the “bunker” of Phillips Hall; I had to bring some garbage out mid-morning and going upstairs to the dumpster was literally peeking out looking up at the sky before I walked out. My roommate Joe punched a hole in the wall later in frustration and that hole remained all year as a reminder of 9/11. The time I lost it - and not against Bin Laden or the terrorists or anything else - was when a kid I knew, M.A., was helping to evacuate the Smith (Student) Center due to a bomb threat, and asking “hey M____, what happened?” he said in a power-trip affect “excuse me, sir, please step aside”. I walked away vowing that if society fell apart I would find him and murder him. I wish I had been more organized to collect the various other rumors of the day: certainty of a car bomb going off in front of the State Department (that must have been the Pentagon crash), the D.C. water supply being poisoned. For a long time many people were (and probably still are) convinced 9/11 was an inside job given the way the towers imploded - if you told me that would be the outcome of a plane hitting the skyscraper I never would have guessed. In my case, I think it was because movies ruined my brain - in the 1990s spectacle blockbuster movie version of the day the tower would have been chopped in half by the plane or the crash would have started a domino cascade through Manhattan (I also think people expected the movie version of COVID with people dying in the streets which also led to hysteria).

It was scary to see military vehicles patrolling the streets of DC (but that has happened again since). For a long time the skies were empty of planes - I took a bus home that Thanksgiving and Christmas (I’m reading that Reagan opened in October which seems soon); when I saw planes again it blew my mind. For all the talk during COVID of people not caring about others’ health, across the nation people were turned away the next day from giving blood (as Karl and I were went we went to donate).

We all have our frozen memories. Many were watching it on TV. My mom was flying and was grounded in Texas and had to drive back to Connecticut with a colleague…it didn’t even strike me to have been scared she was on a hijacked flight that morning, but in typical mom fashion she might not have told me she was on a business trip. That morning was her secretary getting in touch with me that she was confirmed ok, and was IMing with Eric who just started at UConn but seems to have been home? Scott (12) would have otherwise been home alone until the days later before my mom arrived. I was working in the band office listening to the news on the radio, and remember looking in Bari’s face in shock the moment the towers fell. Another girl that walked by had a brother that worked in the towers…early in the timeline she said “tee-hee he always gets himself into these situations” not realizing the gravity I think. A music professor told a student she needed to cancel their lesson to flee. My band director was very like “what’s the big deal, people (like you all) should be working!”. The day started with me passing a guy on the street talking on his phone about the World Trade Center. I thought he said something about an explosion and I assumed he was discussing the 1993 bombing. I heard a  bunch of students (and the professor) showed up to my 11am econ class wondering where everyone was - their version of 9/11 was missing the whole thing.

Father Rob the GWU chaplain later said the churches were packed (and were for a while). Would disaster bring us back to the Catholic church today? Did COVID?

Although the day itself was the acute event, a lot of the legacy of 9/11 was the aftermath - the wars, surveillance, Islamophobia (that econ professor, Prof. Malik, said he was struck by how restrained America was; in India people would be dead in the streets over ethnic cleansing), $2 trillion and countless lives “wasted” - a kid roughly my age from Norwalk Wilfredo was killed in the war and there’s now a bridge named after him, leading to some in-fighting about overdoing it - is that a form of performative patriotism? The era was also awash with American flags (made in China, hawked everywhere), flag lapels, “do you support the troops?”... I’ll tell you how I changed another way: I’m no longer draft age; the next war will have to be a younger man’s fight. We all thought 9/11 would be our Pearl Harbor and were famously just told to stay home and shop. Sometimes I questioned if I should have volunteered, it was the last chance to be a part of something big, and frankly, I stayed in school mostly in “safety”, not physical, but to keep with the “college path” and not deviate from the “plan”. Having gotten my PhD in health economics and realizing I know nothing about how healthcare worked on the ground, I’m so much more open to gap years, work experience, etc., first (although I’m sure I’d do a crappy sweep-the-floor job and wouldn’t get that experience) and army service would have been a chance to have public service…but I later became very opposed to the wars, I guess I’m glad I kept my freedom to not fight.

This blog began in what still felt like the aftermath of 9/11; I was working at the Census and “Terror Code Orange” (or red or yellow) still meant something very real in terms of how thorough the security guards were at entrance. This all seems like a surreal distant dream memory. Coincidentally I’ve been doing a rewatch of The Sopranos; I’ve gone from the earlier seasons when the towers stood and were featured in the intro to the later seasons where they were absent. The vibe and aesthetic is a time capsule - if I was in a time machine I’m not even sure I’d fit into that world anymore, which I’ve noted is ironic because it’s the world I’m from and the one I’m often nostalgic for. There’s probably no stronger evidence of the changes.

Whatever the Occasion

Via DesignTaxi, I saw a smart ad campaign providing it's always time for a McFlurry (as if we needed to be reminded). A timely version could have been "Argentina Wins. {McFlurry} Spain Wins. {McFlurry}"

With a middle-aged mindfulness towards calories, I was reflecting on how comfort food is also celebratory food. If your aunt dies, people are showing up with banana bread, baked ziti, and cake. If you win the lottery, you're not eating the opposite of that. Like, when your numbers hit that's not the day you're eating a salad.

There should be a word for this

What do you call that feeling when you walk into a empty restaurant having made reservations well in advance, a mix of embarrassment for the restaurant's poor showing and dread that you probably should have chosen a better patronized restaurant?

An Ancient Roman Teen Girl, Today

 I asked AI (Microsoft Copilot) to render a picture of an Ancient Roman teenager if she were alive in the 1990s. I think this captured it pretty well. I love the (ancient) tunic, hair and jewelry & (modern) jean jacket aesthetic. The expression is timeless!