‘What was it like just after the 9/11 attacks?’
Two generations find a shared experience
The young woman was curious. “What was it like just after the 9/11 attacks?” she asked.
As I began to reply, she took a break from cutting my hair. In a mirror at the salon, I noticed her waiting for my response. I was taken back by her earnestness. I thought she was just humoring another gray-haired baby boomer customer.
Instead of continuing with my reply, I asked her a question: “What do remember?”
“Oh, I’m not old enough to remember anything about it,” she replied. “Just what I’ve been told.”
I’ve been pondering her response since that day, late last month.
“Just what I’ve been told.” There are moments when the past 20 years since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks feel like 20 months ago, or 20 minutes ago. Everything rushes back for those of us old enough to remember the phone calls that morning from friends, loved ones or co-workers asking the same urgent question. “Are you watching this on TV?” From that moment on, all of us shared the experience together, with nine out of 10 of us watching it live on television. Every frantic minute of the station-to-station coverage. It didn’t matter where we lived, who we voted for, how much money we earned or the color of our skin.
All that mattered was that we were old enough to understand what was happening. And that we shared it in real time. The shock. The sadness. The fear. The anger.
“This may sound weird but I’m kind of jealous of missing all that,” the young woman told me.
I remember feeling similarly odd thoughts about previous historical events in our country, including the attack on Pearl Harbor, the victory after World
War II, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the first moon landing in 1969. For that last event, I was too young to understand the gravity of Apollo 11’s milestone achievement.
“I’ve always been fascinated by 9/11,” the woman said. “Maybe because I didn’t live through it as an adult.”
Since Sept. 11, 2001, more than 70 million people have been born in the U.S., according to Pew Research Center. Millions more were alive at the time but too young to remember one of the darkest days in American history. This includes my fiance’s daughter, who was just 1 month old. To her, the 9/11 attacks are just another history lesson, not a personal memory filled with anxiety and uncertainty.
As we look back on this 20-year anniversary weekend — it’s impossible not to — I think we should also look ahead, through the eyes of younger generations. How will people their age recall or commemorate 9/11 on future milestone dates — its 30th, 40th, or 50th anniversary. For those of us old enough to remember, it will forever be a day that’s impossible to forget. But what about these younger people?
For them, will 9/11 be just another historical date on the calendar? Will it be marred by conspiracy theories or partisan politics or lack of interest? How many of them may one day view some of the 22,000 personal artifacts from 9/11 and simply shrug in apathy?
They didn’t live through the experience, only its aftermath.
My previous column ended with a call to action: “Those of us who remember that somber day eventually came to realize that
are the survivors of this tragedy. It’s our duty to keep telling these stories of what happened as a way to honor the 9/11 victims.”
Have we honored those victims through our actions these past 20 years? Have we honored the U.S. soldiers who were killed in Afghanistan since shortly after 9/11?
If you recall, many of us made promises to each other, and to ourselves, to become better people, to be kinder, more empathetic and more compassionate toward fellow Americans. It didn’t take long for our human instincts to hijack our good intentions.
As I wrote in a column on Sept. 11, 2002, for the one-year anniversary of the attacks, “Heck, we don’t even pause to thank a firefighter anymore.”
I received a lot of hate mail for that public assessment, but it was largely true. Our patriotic sense of “one nation, one people” began to wane as cleanup efforts began on the Ground Zero site. We might as well have erected another memorial there for our collapsed promises. In hindsight, I guess it was too idealistic for us to believe it could last for years to come.
Instead of following through with our promises from the frightening foxhole of Sept. 11, 2001, we tend to be nostalgic about it. We proudly recall that brief blip in history when we transcended our differences. It took a deadly enemy attack on American soil to force us together and to forge us together. It may take another one to reunite us. This may be another unpopular assessment but, again, I believe it’s largely true.
A pandemic obviously isn’t perceived as a national threat by all Americans. And a deadly virus isn’t seen as a common enemy, despite 656,000 fatalities in our country.
At the hair salon, that young woman and I found an unexpected connection between our generations and our shared experiences.
“I can’t believe I’m living through a pandemic,” she told me after my haircut.
“That’s how most of us felt about living through 9/11,” I told her.