Remembering 9/11 in a Generation That Doesn’t
I had an 8 a.m. Modern Philosophy class on Tuesdays and Thursdays during the first semester of my sophomore year at Millikin University in Decatur, Illinois. Existentialism is quite the way to start the day.
I’ve never been a morning person, so dragging myself out of bed was never easy, and arguably much worse when graded on the college sleep vs. class start time scale. But I was up early enough that day to be poking around on my computer, and to have taken down my away message on AOL Instant Messenger. (Yes, it was probably cryptic song lyrics.)
I was about to leave to make the short walk to class. My freshman-year roommate’s ex-girlfriend messaged me and told me to turn on the TV to the local news. I resisted. I didn’t want to be awake or go to Modern Philosophy, so I certainly didn’t want to watch a local morning news segment on a car wash fundraiser or whatever would be on.
“No. I’m serious. Turn on the news.”
I knew then it couldn’t be anything good. I turned on WAND-TV. I stared at the screen with the same thoughts, I’m sure, as most people did. How did a plane hit the World Trade Center? How’s that even possible?
Then the second plane hit the second tower.
I’m not sure exactly how long I sat and stared at the screen. I was so befuddled by what I’d just witnessed that the most logical thing I could think to do next was walk to my philosophy class, since I was already late for it. Routine is often a comfort in chaos. When I got to the room, Dr. Money (yes, real name) had written on the chalkboard, “Go find a TV now.”
For some reason, instead of walking back to my room, I went over to the student union. A TV sat in the lobby, and only a small group of people gathered around it. This being a time before the proliferation of cell phones and the instant communication of this kind of news, and being a college campus, many people were either in class or asleep at this time of the morning. I joined them, watching in silence.
After about 10 minutes, the South Tower collapsed.
Unable or unwilling — or both, most likely — to really process what I’d just seen happen on live television, I turned and headed into the cafeteria. I ran right into Brett, who lived down the hall from me my freshman year.
“What’s up, Eric?”
“The World Trade Center just collapsed.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
We stared at each other for about a minute. Brett didn’t believe what I was telling him, no matter how much I insisted.
I told him roughly the same thing that had started my morning: “Go turn on a TV.”
It’s hard for me to get my head around the notion that it’s been 25 years since 9/11. Each anniversary, it feels like it was yesterday. But the rest of the year, it certainly does feel more distant.
A few years ago, when I was running marketing and communications at the Acton Institute, one of our interns asked me a question about 9/11. Each intern class works on a capstone project that they present as groups at the end of their internship. One of my department’s interns was in a group looking at some aspect of the wars the United States had fought since the Second World War.
This intern wanted to know what I thought the long-run effects of 9/11 were on American society and culture. I’m sometimes quick to answer questions confidently, and only then start to question my own immediate conclusions. (Thanks to anyone out there saying, “No, that’s not the Eric I know.”) I think I’d said something to the effect of, “I think in a lot of ways we’ve forgotten about it.” Keep in mind this was only a few years post-COVID, and amid the previous chapter of our present political circus.
The more I thought about the question, the less that answer felt right. I think we’re living with the memory of 9/11, and everything that followed it, in less omnipresent ways than we were in the first 5 or 10 years after it happened, but still with very real consequences of what happened that day.
I grew up in the St. Louis area, but I always felt like a New Yorker at heart.
My dad and my brothers were from New York. They moved to Metro East Illinois before I was born. They brought a lot of New York with them. They had the characteristic accents. They were fans of the New York Rangers, which was the first sports team I really fell in love with, and the New York Giants. We were a divided household when it came to baseball. My dad and I are Yankees fans. My brothers grew up rooting for the Yankees, but switched their affiliation to the New York Mets when they landed in St. Louis. The Cardinals were division rivals with the Mets back then, and they felt the need to uphold the New York end of that rivalry.
One of my two brothers moved back to New York as soon as he graduated. In 1996, he was getting married, which prompted my first trip to New York City. We flew in a few days before the wedding, not only for the rehearsal dinner and other pre-ceremony activities, but also to do the requisite touristy things. We got a tour of Madison Square Garden, where I got to see the New York Rangers locker room and sit in Rangers goaltender Mike Richter’s locker, my favorite player at the time.
The first place we went in New York after we landed at the airport was our hotel: the New York Marriott World Trade Center. The hotel had reopened just about two years prior after it was renovated following the damage it sustained in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
The next morning, we walked through the plaza and went up to the observation deck in the South Tower. We couldn’t see much — there was low cloud cover that day, and the view was extremely limited.
A while back, I realized we’d flown in three days before my brother’s wedding. His wedding anniversary is Sept. 14, 1996, which means we flew in on the evening of Sept. 11, 1996.
My first visit to New York City was exactly five years to the day before the world changed.
I was reeling in the days and weeks that followed 9/11.
On the day of the attacks, my parents were on vacation in Hawaii. I called their hotel probably around 10 a.m. Central time, which would have been 5 a.m. in Honolulu. When my dad answered and asked why I was calling so early, I told him the World Trade Center was gone.
“Well, where did they go?” he asked.
I can’t blame him for the snarky response. If I were him and my college-age son called to tell me that, I’d assume he was messing with me, too.
I called my brother in New York, as well. My sister-in-law worked for a financial firm whose offices were about eight blocks from the towers. My brother answered the phone when I called, but told me he was trying to keep the line clear. For those of you who are too young to remember when landline phones were still prominent, and cell phones were rarer, the caller would get a busy signal if the person they were calling was already on the phone. She ended up walking across one of the bridges to get out of Manhattan that day. The world coming to a halt drives home how Manhattan is an island with only so many bridges and tunnels to get you out of there.
My 20th Century Music 2 (yes, that’s a class) professor still wanted to give a test the next day. I emailed him and told him that beyond being affected by these attacks as an American, this also hit close to home for me. I wasn’t going to be there for the test. If he was going to fail me for it, then he could. After some back-and-forth, he reluctantly agreed to let me take it a day or two later.
(This professor, who I had for several classes as well as a director of one of my ensembles, and I would spar over political matters in the coming years. He once announced to the class, after playing some awful modern composition that was just slowed-down and sped-up tape loops, “If you enjoy music like this, you should support Democrats, because Republicans want to cut the National Endowment for the Arts.” After hearing that piece, I only felt more inclined to support the GOP at the time.)
My undergraduate degree is in music business (yes, that’s a degree). When I arrived on Millikin’s campus in the fall of 2000, music was just about all I cared about. The 9/11 attacks were the first big event where I realized there were some other important things going on in the world, and I probably should figure them out.
I watched more news in the days and weeks that followed the attacks than I ever had. I listened to what politicians were saying. Like many Americans at the time, I appreciated President George W. Bush’s leadership in the wake of the attacks. When Bush stood on a pile of rubble with a New York firefighter and a bullhorn on Sept. 14, 2001, and responded to someone in the crowd shouting that they couldn’t hear him — “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” — I knew I had my guy.
A few weeks later, flyers went up for an on-campus event for people who felt compelled to talk about what had happened. For those of you who know me, you’ll not be at all surprised to hear that I felt compelled to talk about what had happened. So, I attended.
The panel included four professors from different departments at the university. They gave four very different perspectives on how what had just happened was really America’s fault. We were asking for it. We needed to understand why the terrorists who did this would want to do this to us.
Now, I think there’s a very real need to answer that last question. But the idea that there is any answer to it that justifies the wanton murder of more than 3,000 innocent people in airplanes and office buildings is, to borrow a term from social science, batshit insane.
I was the second person in line to ask a question. My memory is hazy, but the thrust of the question was, “What the hell is wrong with you?”
I didn’t know it at the time, but that was the first step down the path to the work I do today.
In June, my family and I went to Dallas for a wedding. While there, we visited the George W. Bush Presidential Center. While I can absolutely dissect and critique plenty of Bush’s presidency, I have and always will have a sentimental attachment to Dubya. And not just for that immediate post-9/11 leadership. My wife and I met at a sendoff party in Chicago for the 2004 Republican National Convention. His reelection campaign is, in a way, why we’re together and why we have the family we do today.
As I’m sure you’d imagine, a large section of the Bush Presidential Center is dedicated to 9/11. No matter your opinions on Bush himself, that section of the museum is particularly moving. For the news coverage from that day and the days that followed, which plays on a loop. For the display of the names of every person who lost their life in 9/11.
For the artifacts on display, including the aforementioned bullhorn and the presidential jacket he wore throwing out the first pitch before Game 3 of the 2001 World Series at Yankee Stadium. Again, feel how you will about the Bush administration — the dude threw a strike while wearing a bulletproof vest under the jacket, and with all the world watching.
We went to dinner later, and we talked with our kids (ages 15 and 13) about that day. We got a little weepy as we recalled that day. And for understandable reasons. I hope it helped them to understand the significance it holds for us both, and in that weird way, how it led to their very existence.
Now 25 years on, what is the legacy of 9/11? How would I really answer that question my intern at the Acton Institute asked me that day a few years back?
It feels clichéd to say that was the day America lost its innocence. It also feels a little dumb. You could argue we were never really innocent, or you could argue that there were plenty of other “moments we lost our innocence,” from presidential assassinations to domestic terrorism to Pearl Harbor and more.
But think of the time.
The Cold War ended when the Soviet Union collapsed on Dec. 26, 1991. The Evil Empire, America’s primary geostrategic foe for decades that perpetually had nuclear weapons pointed at us, went out with a whimper instead of a bang. And thank goodness it did. For most of the 1990s, we lived with the peace dividend that the end of the Cold War engendered. The economy boomed in the 1990s. We balanced the budget. We spent endless political energy fighting over the president’s extramarital affair.
One reason the 2000 presidential election was so close was arguably that the stakes were so small. No major crises loomed. No major foes were threatening the world yet. Bush and Al Gore argued over what to do with the budget surplus — Bush wanted to return it to taxpayers, and Gore wanted to put it in the “lockbox” made memorable by Darrell Hammond’s impression of Gore on “Saturday Night Live.” Bush was campaigning on a humble foreign policy.
When you hear accounts of 9/11, you’ll often hear about how beautiful the morning was in New York City. Idyllic. Like that post-Cold War 1990s period felt.
And then shattered, violently, in explosions of steel, concrete, and jet fuel.
People will often describe the period that immediately followed as “9/12 America,” a time when we felt united in solidarity with our fellow Americans in the wake of unspeakable horror. I don’t really remember when all that ended. But it did end, and when it did, we were on a path toward our currently deformed national politics. Not long after, we started hearing conspiracy theories about the attacks. And while conspiracy theories have always been with us — there is a conspiratorial style to American politics on both the left and the right — they seem to have accelerated in the aftermath of the attacks.
When that Acton intern asked me that question about how we’re still living with the legacy of 9/11, as I was reconsidering my initial answer to her, it hit me: “You weren’t even alive when it happened, were you?”
She wasn’t. She was born several months later.
I had to sit with that for a few moments before I began to re-answer her original question.
It seems silly to say that an event that happened 225 years into America’s existence was the end of our beginning. But it ended something. The end of a brief, mostly peaceful period in modern American life. What it’s given way to has been tumultuous, to say the least: war, a financial crisis, rancorous populist politics, and a global pandemic, among other things. It’s the world I came of age in. A world that was shaped by and seemingly all downstream of the moment the clock stopped on that Tuesday morning in September of 2001.
Just one-tenth of our nation’s total existence has passed since those attacks. The 9/11 Memorial and Museum estimates that 100 million Americans have no living memory of that day. For those of us who do, who were shaped by it, it’s our obligation to help them understand it.
Only by understanding what that day and its aftermath felt like can they answer the question that intern asked me. Only then will they know how we can heal from it.
To never forget, they first have to know.