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.