There is no “before 9/11.” Not for us, anyway.
I can see the Twin Towers falling in the back of my mind. I’ve seen the footage so many times that it’s been etched into some part of my consciousness like an old, hazy memory. But it isn’t a memory.
I think that we may be too close to understand this one. It’s much easier to leaf through your history textbook and take careful notes on trends and themes of the 18th century than it is to take a hard look at 2001 and how profoundly one day changed your own life. Hearing 9/11 stories feels like listening to a friend go on about a long-gone loved one that you never knew. You ache because they do, but you can’t quite place that sinking feeling in your stomach.
Of course, that’s not quite fair to say because 9/11 isn’t just a sad story about a friend of a friend. 9/11 is, and always will be, the defining moment of our lives. We were too young to understand it, too young to even know that it happened, but September 11, 2001, had more influence on how we live and who we are today than anything else likely ever will.
I have no memory of peacetime. I was two years old on 9/11 and when we invaded Afghanistan. I was four when we launched Operation Iraqi Freedom, seven when Saddam Hussein hung, and 12 when Osama bin Laden was finally found. I don’t remember where I was on September 11. I do know that I was eating waffles after a sleepover with my best friend when the Hussein news broke, and I was on a field trip with my class when bin Laden was taken out.
We’ve grown up on outrageous tales of a time when the TSA didn’t exist and you didn’t need to be two hours early to the airport to catch your flight — a time where American spirit wasn’t three parts red, white, and blue, one part fear. It feels silly to even imagine a time like that, where the airports were relaxed and the plot of every political drama didn’t revolve around terror from the inside.
Some of my earliest memories of school involve sitting in classrooms, pledging allegiance to the flag of The United States of America and trying to wrap my second-grade mind around the bad guys that hurt all of those people just for being American. It always seemed to me that we spent all of that time in lower school talking about 9/11 so that we wouldn’t be able to forget it. I’m not sure that worked.
You can’t forget what you never remembered in the first place.
I know that my mother drove to pick my big sister up from preschool when she heard the news, and that I was home with my grandmother. I know that my father was at work at the fire station, and that some of his friends drove in big trucks and buses to New York to try and put America back together. They arrived before it was 9/12. I know that my father stood outside a locked-down fire station and watched the Air Force One travel east, where the President would stand on the press podium and try to tell the world that we were going to be okay. He knew that we were going to war.
I don’t remember any of that. I just know it because those are the kinds of things that people tell you when it’s early September and they feel like if they don’t keep talking the world might shatter around them.
What I’m trying to say is that I know that the closer we get to the college application deadline, the more seriously I’m thinking about which cities would be targets for terrorism. I know that I’m not afraid of flying, but I am afraid of flights. I know that I breathe a sigh of relief every time my sister texts me “landed.”
There is no “before 9/11,” but we haven’t reached the “after.”
Many agree that 9/11 hurtled our nation into a new era. Just like any other civilization moving to a new time, we don’t know what we’ve gotten into yet. Our lives will serve as the transitional period into an America whose flag hasn’t been sketched, whose national anthem hasn’t been written, and whose soldiers haven’t been born.
I am 17 years old and will not be able to bleed any kind of understanding from the day that ripped America’s heart right out of its chest. Here’s what I know about 9/11: we will never stop trying to understand. We will never be able to remember, but that doesn’t mean that we’re ever going to forget.
