• CU Boulder students reflect on growing up post-9/11.
For a generation of students at the University of Colorado Boulder, the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, are among their earliest and most foundational childhood memories, ones that shaped the way they view the world.
Astrophysics graduate student Will Waalkes, 30, was in fifth grade when the 9/11 attacks happened. It was a Scholastic Book Fair day at school and he remembers leaving early, coming home and watching his dad watch the news coverage on television, visibly angry.
“Those things were happening and I didn’t really understand it at the time, but I was getting the gist that this wasn’t as simple as, ‘A thing happened and people died.’ That America is different now,” he said. “I never stopped thinking about that in the sense of the entire political landscape of my life is shaped by that moment. I’ve only ever understood the world in a post-9/11 world, and it’s a really ugly place.”
Jazz Studies doctoral student Matt Smiley, 36, was in high school and just starting to become more aware of politics when the attacks occurred. The band he performed in with friends mostly played music with political leanings inspired by
Rage Against the Machine.
On the morning of the attacks, Smiley was in one of the only classrooms in his school that wasn’t tuned to news coverage of New York City, Washington, D.C., or Pennsylvania. His teacher insisted on moving forward with the lesson, so it wasn’t until later that morning he realized what had happened.
Smiley remembers the immediate surge of patriotism that followed the attacks and how that began to mingle with rhetoric about going to war and fighting an enemy. As a teenager, Smiley said he experienced pushback from family members and friends for holding views critical of the government after 9/11.
“If anything, the older I’ve gotten the more political, progressive and left-leaning I’ve gotten,” he said.
It’s hard to say what his current political views would look like outside the context of the attacks, Smiley said.
“At least for me, a lot of my political views did happen as a result of all these war efforts and as a result of the War on Terror,” he said.
Graduate student Joshua Paup was five years old when the attacks occurred and had just moved to Fort Carson for his father’s military career. The attacks are among his earliest memories.
“It was around six or so in the morning when the news began to break, and I remember not knowing what was really happening,” he said. “All that I was more or less bothered with is that every TV channel in my house had stopped showing cartoons.”
He remembers his mom later telling him not to watch what was happening on the television.
Growing up in a military community, Paup remembers there being a lot of stress, frustration and anger among his friends and their families, along with uncertainty about what was going to happen next. Would their parents be the next to deploy?
“As I grew up through elementary school it was quite evident that a lot of the frustration, as a product of spouses being deployed overseas, was making life at home very turbulent,” he said. “But you’re seven or eight years old and don’t think a lot about it.”
It wasn’t until years later that he began to reflect on how 9/11 changed his life in ways big and small and to wonder what his life would be like if it hadn’t centered so much, in those early years, on the attacks.
“I often wonder what my parents’ relationship would have been like if my father wasn’t away from home growing up. I often think about what kind of world we’re living in as a result of the actions of 9/11,” he said. “You start thinking about how stable your life would have been.”
And though it’s been 20 years, Paup said, it still hits close to home.
“It’s something that still has a ripple effect on us today and we’re still seeing the direct effects of 9/11 on us today, whether on our attitudes or the way governments go about their governing,” he said.