The Pip’s first social-studies homework assignment for seventh grade was to interview somebody old enough to remember the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon about what it was like. After crumbling into dust from confronting the realization that it is, in fact, possible at least in principle for a kid his age to have a parent who wouldn’t clearly remember that day, I reconstituted and answered the questions for the assignment.
As befits that kind of event at that kind of distance, my memories of the day itself are vivid but somewhat fragmentary. I had just started at Union— I think it was my sixth full day as a professor— and taught a recitation for the pre-med physics class that morning from 8-8:50 am. I got back to my office, opened a web browser, and looked at the Washington Post website to see what was going on in the world, and saw a story about the first plane hitting the WTC. I remember thinking “Whoa, that’s not good…” and then being unable to read the actual story because the Internet at that time was not terribly robust and all the news servers were overwhelmed.
At some point, I wandered down to the campus center where there were TV’s tuned to the news, and stood in a crowd of other people watching the towers burn. I wound up right next to the Dean of the Faculty, and when the first tower collapsed, somebody came up to her and said “Christie, you need to go back to your office and send an announcement that classes are canceled for the rest of the day.” She looked startled and said “Really?” and like three of us near her said “YES!!!”
I remember having trouble calling Kate, who was still in New Haven that year. I remember everything being eerily quiet that afternoon and evening, until maybe 9 or 10pm when they sent a C-130 from the air base across the river off to… somewhere. It went over the house where I was renting an apartment at low altitude, and it sounded like the end of the world.
I remember driving the Mass Pike to Boston the next weekend for a friend’s wedding, and seeing American flags hanging from every overpass, even the ones in the middle of fucking nowhere. The first one made me tear up, and to this day I’m a bit more sentimental about flags (I can never resist taking photos like the one at the top). That car ride was also the first time I heard the Ryan Adams song “New York, New York,” and no matter how shitty a human being he may be, I’ll always have a soft spot for that tune.
Most of the questions for The Pip’s assignment were pretty routine stuff— what do you remember, did you know anybody in NYC or Washington at that time, etc.— but one sort of late in the assignment brought me up short. It asked “Do you have any lingering fears from that day?” It made me realize that not only do I not have any particular lingering fears from 9/11, I haven’t even thought about it in any depth in ages and ages.
That’s not to say that I’ve forgotten it, but it’s receded into mostly a collection of fairly rote stories. I tell the anecdotes about the Dean and the C-130 on a very regular basis. But thinking about it seriously, trying to remember more than those scattered and vivid images, or draw lessons from it? Not a regular occurrence, not remotely.
(One of the other questions was “What lessons should we learn from 9/11?” and my two suggestions were “When your intelligence services bring you a warning that a terrorist group is planning an attack in the US, take it seriously” and “Have less to do with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.” The Pip laughed at the first of those, and I had to explain that that was the serious answer…)
(Well, more serious, anyway. Fuck the Saudis…)
For quite a few years after 2001, I maintained a tradition of blanking out my blog for the day— I would set it to display a single post, and then do a post that was just 110 carriage returns. Then I’d log off for the day, because there’s really basically nothing anyone with a media platform, social or otherwise, is likely to say about the anniversary that’d going to make me glad I read or listened to it. This poem exists, and still makes me tear up, and that’s as much as I need.
I dropped that tradition several years back when the school calendar shook out so that SteelyKid’s first day fell on the 11th. And I realized then that it meant more to me to look forward to the future with my kids than to keep picking at the scabs of the past. So I posted a first-day-of-school photo, and a note saying that I was done with the annual blackout. And I haven’t really thought much about it since.
I don’t know that I have a grand point, here, beyond “It’s funny how life works…” I remember the feeling that we were living through epochal events at the time, and it’s definitely right at the top of the list of “Where were you when X?” events in my lifetime. At the same time, it’s also really faded as a thing that I actively think about. The Pip needed an additional question, and we came up with “Where does this rank among significant bad events in your lifetime?” I put it third, after Covid (number one with a bullet) and the 2008 economic crash; 9/11 has a singular dramatic character that those lack, but I think they vault past it in terms of the scale of the toll. It’s followed by the two Space Shuttle disasters, which are also singular but far less significant. If you had told me in early 2002 that this is where I’d end up, though… Well, I don’t know what I would’ve thought about it.
But I’m not sure it’s a Bad Thing— in fact, I suspect he opposite. Life goes on, nature heals, trauma fades. History recedes into legend, legend fades into myth, and all that…
It probably would’ve been good to end this with a first-day-of-school photo from this year, but I don’t have one. The kids started on different days, and wouldn’t pose, anyway. Which is another kind of “Life moves fast…” moment. Anyway, here’s a button:
And here’s another:
I was working for the US Government in Nigeria at the time and although I was very angry at the terrorists (as were my Nigeran colleagues) it also made me very proud of my work which I considered, and still do, was making the world less congenial to the kind of hatred that inspired the attack.
In time I came to anger at the Bush administration that used the attack to create TSA and metal detectors at buildings and orange alerts and especially invading Iraq, torturing prisoners, Guantanamo. That was the real damage that the attacks did. Osama ben Laden must have died a happy man and he owed it all to George W Bush.
I was born in Canada, and grew up in Montréal, where I experienced the FLQ crisis as a child. This taught me that terrorism is normal, though undesirable. On 9/11/2001 I had been living in the US for several years. I was rather surprised to discover that most Americans had not absorbed this lesson, whether from examples outside the US (e.g. the IRA) or domestic examples such as the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. They thought terrorism only happened to other people, in countries far far away, most of them third world. Most Americans I encountered were profoundly shocked by the event. Most immigrants and other foreigners were not, however much they may have sympathized with the victims.
My other main take away from 9/11 was the clearly visible drop in average behavioural standards in the aftermath of 9/11. I was a mailing list moderator at the time. There was a notable drop in civility on list that lasted for a month or two. People were cranky; many individuals posted with less thought than their previous habits, and I was kept busy stamping out flame wars, on a list that previously only had a small amount of trouble of this kind, and that primarily from a handful of "usual suspects."
There was also a bunch of bad behaviour motivated by patriotism. People insisted that everyone in the US should acquire and fly a US flag. I recall categorically refusing, on the grounds that it would be improper for me to fly a US flag except in company with a Canadian one, and those had not suddenly become trivially easy to acquire. And some quantity of Americans thought it would be helpful to harass anyone they encountered who might possibly be Muslim, leading to a lot of fear among brown people in the US who didn't look obviously Hispanic.
As for the event itself, I was reading a mailing list in the morning before work. Someone posted "turn on your TV". This and perhaps other ambiguous messages caused me to check the news, which I was not then in the habit of following. At that stage not very much was known, and I was concerned there might be additional trouble in my location (major west coast urban area) but figured I might as well go to work anyway. Much paid time was spent that day with coworkers clustered around television sets, while very little work was done.
Meanwhile at least one of my friends was in Europe, about to head back home to California. (I think she wasn't in the air yet.) The flight was cancelled or diverted, and getting home proved quite a saga. IIRC, her knitting needles were confiscated - she was in the habit of knitting on long plane rides. But she did get home eventually.
It turned out that I had second order acquaintances in the twin towers (people I knew, knew them), and one reasonably frequent contact who'd worked there himself until moving to California, not all that much earlier. As you can imagine, those with actual connections to the events were especially upset. That didn't surprise me - it was Joe and Jane Random, who knew no one in New York or Washington, who freaked out as if their world had practically ended.