Day of change
The morning of Sept. 11, 2001, did not only shatter our sense of invincibility in the aftermath of the Cold War. It also realigned and expanded the government’s role as our everyday protector. It led us into two wars, one of which still rages. It compelled many of us to willingly sacrifice liberties for the sake of security.
It changed American life in ways, large and small, so profound and entrenched that we hardly give a second thought to what it was like 16 years and one day ago to travel, attend a concert or sporting event — or talk on the phone, search the Internet or walk down the street with confidence that our actions are beyond the reach of government.
The trauma of 9/11 was such, and the need for emergency measures so apparent, that most of our elected leaders could not pause to consider the long-term implications of their responses. The so-called Patriot Act, rushed through Congress within a month, gave the government wide latitude to monitor data from telecom and tech firms. It wasn’t until 2013 that leaks from whistle-blower Edward Snowden revealed that the National Security Agency had been scooping up metadata of every American’s phone calls for more than a decade.
President George W. Bush ordered the war in Afghanistan with the most just of intentions: to topple the Taliban, which had provided safe haven for al Qaeda, the terrorist group behind the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Sixteen years later, President Trump is sending additional troops to try to stabilize an ever-mutating conflict. The Taliban still control wide swaths of Afghanistan. The threat of al Qaeda has been diminished, only to have morphed into a less centralized but no less lethal group of extremists known as the Islamic State.
Nearly 3,000 people lost their lives that day, but the longer-term death toll is far greater. It includes the more than 2,300 Americans who died in Afghanistan, the more than 4,400 who died in the Iraq War (which was cast by Bush, disingenuously, as an extension of the 9/11 response) and the untold numbers of first responders and rescue and recovery workers who suffered the effects of toxic fallout.
None of us who witnessed the attack on the United States, in person or on television, will forget where we were, what we saw and what we thought on that day. Its complex legacy continues to reverberate, even if we have become numb to its presence.