The World Trade Center, Lower Manhattan, Date Unknown (Credit: Unknown)
Those who do not learn from history are bound to repeat it.
For as long as I have been writing about serious topics, I’ve written about 9/11. It was a moment that reshaped the country and shocked the world. It became the pivotal axis for society during my upbringing. I have written multiple articles on this website about the events of September 11th, 2001. As one of the youngest people around who witnessed it, there’s a sense of obligation I feel to understand it. In the way that humans try to process a tragedy by understanding it, a firm grasp over this one event has helped inform my worldview. It helps me steer clear of the blind hatred and misinformed anger which defined my childhood. And grasping both the lead up and the aftermath helps inform my opinion on and desires for our society and the people leading it. On top of that, it will be my generation’s responsibility to talk about that horrific day because we were here to witness it, and to record the stories of others who saw it firsthand so that they may be accurate in the history books.
I write often here that I was a child of two shadows. The shadows of the grave of the Cold War, and the smoke at Ground Zero. Both events shaped my childhood and the society which raised me. I used that phrase as the title of a five part series I wrote in summer 2024 about the major events which shaped America in the 1990s and 2000s. A large portion of this series centered around 9/11 because it is the single event which served as the clearest marker of the division between the 20th and 21st centuries. The second entry laid the groundwork for the understanding of the prelude to 9/11, and the third entry, subtitled ‘The Day the Sky Cracked Open’ recounts the actual events of that day. Part IV chronicled the War on Terror. The finale was about how the fallout from these events still affects us to this day.
The events of the day have been chronicled to death. I’ve summarized them at least twice on this website. I have watched documentaries, read books, listened to interviews with survivors, and have tried to work out all of the reasons why it happened, and assess the aftermath. In a clinical way, there is a twisted logic, and the entire affair is a story of petty grievances meshed with quasi-religious fanaticism on one side, and ineptitude and misjudgment on the other. When these two forces collided, it gave way to disastrous consequences.
9/11, however, is much more of an emotional day for people. Everyone alive in America can remember where they were when it happened. Thousands of people in New York City had their world completely upended. It was difficult to find someone in the city who didn’t know someone who died in the towers or knew someone who was connected to one of the victims. The city at the center of the universe was dealt a body blow. Funerals happened for months on end as the site was being cleared and more human remains were found. The grief was unimaginable for an entire city and the people who knew and were connected to them.
The loss of the people was best represented by the loss of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, which had become icons that represented the city, being ripped from the Manhattan skyline. Never was so poignant a metaphor for the whole evil affair as mighty structures turned into a smoking pile of rubble; a deep, cavernous scar in the ground. The hole where the World Trade Center once stood became the perfect image to describe how those who lost someone in the attacks felt. And much like many of them, the site has been renewed. Permanent reminders are etched in the ground of what was lost, but there is life and joy and newness at that place today.
I’ve written poems about that era of New York which was ended definitively when the towers came crashing down, imagining what a life then was like. I wrote a tribute to the World Trade Center itself, tying in its meaning as a symbol of days gone by. The Twin Towers stand out to me the most; perfectly functional buildings in active use aren’t just torn down randomly one day. You usually know ahead of time when one is going down, so a landmark can be witnessed before it becomes a pile of rubble. I’m as old as they were when they came down, and in three years, it’ll have been as long without them as it was with. Their power is in what they represent, both then and now. Before, they were a symbol of America’s economic might and lofty dreams. Now, the images of them still are a symbol and representation of an era dead and gone. The memory of the site once they fell is a reminder of the consequences of our own hubris, and the dangers of fanaticism.
America was searching for purpose after the Cold War and anesthetized itself after 9/11. In an era where scrutiny of our leaders should have been the priority, everyone dove headfirst into consumerism and turning a blind eye to the uncomfortable truths. America went back to its ‘normal’ life and refused to recognize that life had completely changed over the course of one perfect, sunny morning in September. At a time when we should have paid more attention to what our elected leaders were doing, and scrutinizing everything, we blindly trusted because it was more convenient to let others handle the ‘hard things.’
That willful ignorance led to two wars which were devastating for Americans as we fed our youth in uniform to a pair of meat grinders with no clear objectives, no solid plan, and no way out. The destabilization of Iraq, a nation which had absolutely nothing to do with the September 11th attacks killed hundreds of thousands with the regional infighting which followed the illegal and unjustified invasion. Bush’s idiotic execution of De-Ba’athification led to a massive power vacuum in the country which allowed for ISIS to rise. Even a decade after ISIS lost most of their influence and control in the region, the families displaced by the decades of fighting are still trying to find their way home.
Osama bin Laden’s goal with 9/11 was to provoke America into a war on Islam, which he believed the Islamic world would certainly win. The idea was to overextend America’s resources so that division and conflict would be stoked at home. In many respects, he got his wish. We were dragged into two wars which dragged on for twenty years, and destroyed Americans’ faith in their government and institutions leaving them ripe for a takeover by self-serving, self-aggrandizing cretins who sought only to glorify themselves at the expense of the American people.
9/11 paved the way for the War in Afghanistan: a 20-year-long quasi-occupation which had the short term effect of booting religious fanatics from power and freeing an oppressed people. Only, in the immediate aftermath, the United States chose instead to try to reshape a nation with the bare minimum of resources, never took accountability for its shortcomings, and presided over waste, fraud, mismanagement, and abuse as the cost of doing business. Once Afghanistan was ‘liberated,’ the Bush administration became more focused on starting a war with Iraq, who had nothing to do with 9/11, for reasons still not completely understood to this day. The lack of focus on Afghanistan coupled with the pointless imperial diversion into Iraq led to Americans dying in droves in both nations, and killing even more civilians because we turned two somewhat stable albeit draconian nations into free fire zones for 15-20 years. We withdrew from Iraq as a somewhat functional democracy, but is heavily compromised by neighboring Iran. We withdrew from Afghanistan by cutting a deal with the Taliban, whom we ousted in the first place, because we had grown tired of dealing with the nation which we destabilized in the first place.
Our moral failure gave a generation of hope that they could grow up in an Afghanistan that was freer and more peaceful only to rip it away from them. It’s a sinister summary of the entire post-9/11 era, and a chilling warning about what is to come.
The Mistakes of the Past are Playing Out Once More
We are once again engaged in a costly and pointless war in the Middle East with no exit strategy, or plan, or even discernible goals. We’ve become too cowardly to admit defeat that we will continue ratcheting up the body count to save face. It’s morally abominable, ethically repugnant, and utterly pathetic. Iran became the way that a bunch of cowards could pretend to be tough guys to the rest of the world and to the domestic audiences who don’t know any better while willingly (and in this case gleefully) making other people shoulder the burden. Trump’s war in Iran is the kind of ill-advised quagmire with no discernible goal preventing any sort of exit that Bush got into in Iraq. The Iran War is driven by optics rather than strategic goals, which means the only thing which will come of it is death for scores of people who do not deserve it.
Donald Trump and his presidency represents everything wrong with the post-9/11 America in which our nastiest impulses were completely unleashed. The fear, hatred, desire for petty revenge, willingness to break rules to get his way, and incessant need to make everything about himself to justify making others suffer. America’s actions today echo ours after 9/11, but with the added twist of the President gleefully and openly paying honor to our adversaries, such as bragging about being complimented by the Taliban. In America after 9/11, that should be unthinkable. That statement would have ended any other presidency. To favorably compare oneself to the group that sheltered Osama bin Laden would have caused a national uproar if any other president had done so, but that isn’t even the most craven thing related to 9/11 which Donald Trump has done. He bragged about a nonexistent moment where he was saved from the World Trade Center site by firemen. Then griped about how that firefighter became more famous than him. This is on top of his bragging about owning the tallest building in Manhattan a scant few hours after the World Trade Centers crumbled to the ground with a thunderous crash and sent a biblical plume of dust and ash across Lower Manhattan, taking 2,603 souls with them. It’s obvious that September 11th doesn’t mean a damn thing to Trump or anyone who supports him.
9/11 was held up as a sacred day in American history for the last 25 years. It was used to justify everything from an unjust war which killed over a million people (the overwhelming majority being civilians) and destabilized an entire region to the erosion of civil liberties and creation of a police state ostensibly for security to not saying mean things about the President of the United States. Any criticism after 9/11 was made out to be unpatriotic, so the news outlets abdicated their responsibility of informing the public about the activities of our elected leaders in favor of writing fluff pieces and supporting blind loyalty. The media was complicit in justifying the atrocities of the Bush Administration, and when the chance to tell truth to power was given to it as a chance at redemption, the media has chosen to justify and amplify the current president’s fabrications. When every speech has to work in some mention of weapons of mass destruction, because the selfish, stupid justifications of war do not change.
I watched, in 2021, a few weeks shy of the 20th Anniversary, Afghan civilians falling off of the landing gear of Air Force transport planes because clinging to the wheels of an aircraft was preferable to staying in a country about to be taken back over by the Taliban. And as strong of a condemnation of the United States’ cowardice in destroying a nation and refusing to rebuild it, I could not help but draw the parallels to the good, honest people who jumped from above the impact zones at the World Trade Center twenty-five years ago, where the fall was preferable to the fire because death was a certainty.
It is a curse upon all of our houses that such sights ever happened again after 9/11. It is a moral failure of the highest caliber that our children are still living in a world where this is a reality.
I wrote about the wars sparked after 9/11. The pointlessness of Iraq, the conflict which nobody could ever tell us precisely why we fought. I lamented the state of Afghanistan after we betrayed it and left the Afghans to suffer and die just to wash our hands of our own mess. We showed ourselves to be soulless, selfish, shortsighted, and stupid.
Yet, it should have come as no surprise. We are a nation seemingly adverse to learning our lessons even when they hurt us as much as they have in recent years. We continue slamming our hand down on a hot stove because we think that this time, maybe, it will be different. 9/11 is forever a specter in the American consciousness because we have not yet reckoned with the real effect it hand on our nation’s identity, psyche, and actions. We learned nothing. We sacrificed freedom to fear in the false hope it would facilitate greater security. Instead, we became paranoid, mean, distrustful. Terrorism became a convenient word to demonize anyone we disagreed with. 9/11 was a scary event, but we allowed ourselves to stay so scared in its aftermath that we gave up strides towards reaching our ideals.
9/11 is often seen with two different perspectives. Older people remember the shock and horror the day brought to the shored of the greatest superpower. They recall how powerless the most powerful nation on earth felt to protect it. But it has been invoked so frequently since that horrible day twenty-five years ago with such cynical motivations that to the younger generations, it’s lost its importance. With good reason, since so many of the people who have invoked 9/11 over the years only did it to further their own agendas, paying lip service to brave heroes while voting against giving first responders healthcare, or voting in favor of sending their kids on wars of aggression in the name of protecting us from terrorism.
We have failed so horrendously in moving forward the right way after 9/11 because we have never taken the time to understand it. A quarter-century on, it’s still a raw wound in our collective psyche because we look at it without clear eyes. We make decisions supposedly to honor the victims that spit in the face of what they died for. We gave up our liberty and ideals in the name of security. We gave up our morality in the name of fueling imperial ambitions. We gave up the brilliance of America being the world’s greatest melting pot because we were afraid. And we have done nothing to make the world better in the quarter-century since we were attacked. We brought the same devastation onto innocents that our enemies doled unto us on September 11th, 2001.
The answer is a resounding, “No.”
America’s Next Chapter
Growing up in post-9/11 America was a complicated affair. I came of age loving my country which was so grievously wounded, and watched as we committed atrocities in the name of freedom which I did not quite understand. War was a way of life. Paranoia was standard operating procedure. Vigilance was a necessity. Willingly accepting the militarization of those meant to keep order and peace at home, increasingly treating us like the enemy was what I was supposed to do as a good American because you never knew where the terrorists would crawl from next. I was taught that it’s okay to let the government snoop through everything because only those who did something wrong had something to hide. It was only as I got older and began to contextualize everything, especially after my own personal research into these events begun in 2020, that I realized just how much ugliness was associated with 9/11.
But I could not deny the stories of those who lost loved ones at the World Trade Center or the Pentagon or on Flight 93. There was pain, and sorrow, and an anguished cry for our leaders to do better and be better. Watching them fail to heed that cry or actively spite it was a difficult thing to grapple with. Yet, today of all days still gives me hope for America. The memorial ceremony in New York City remained above politics, as it always has. September 11th was an attack on New York City, and the Pentagon, and the Capitol had it not been for the brave souls aboard United Flight 93 who fought back. The ceremony took place in a rebuild World Trade Center, showing that America can and will rebuild. In an era where we are straining our democracy because of the path we took after 9/11, I still believe that there are lessons it can teach us, and inspiration it can give us.
When I look back at 9/11, and try to dissect what it meant, and how it has affected us, there are so many things which come to mind. But I absolutely love some of the late night monologues which came at the first shows back. Letterman’s is a favorite, and Conan had stirring words as well. Two men who had accepted New York as an adopted home hit some very poignant points. But the one that always makes me choked up is Jon Stewart’s. Stewart is a lifelong resident of the New York metro area (born in New York, grew up in New Jersey), and it shows in how he reacts to his city being hurt by such a devastating attack. How he feels about the city also shows in his tireless fight for those who were made sick by the attacks and the cleanup efforts. Stewart took his comedic show and used it to speak truth to power, and used his profile to fight for those who were being abandoned for being politically inconvenient. The duality of being humorous and passionately engaged is the lesson at the heart of how we should respond to 9/11. It is an unimaginable tragedy, and its ugly scars are still felt all these years later. It’s important to treat it as such. But it cannot be allowed to dictate our lives. The fear and pain and uncertainty that it brought cannot be the only thing that affects us.
There was a moment, when the fires still raged at Ground Zero, where the nation could have come together. And in some aspects, it looked like we did. George Bush threw out the first pitch at a baseball game which was a healing moment not only for New York City, but for America as a whole. It was a moment where the country stood up and said, “We are one nation, we will recover from this, because the spirit of liberty is not so easily defeated!” And that earnest sentiment was exploited by politicians seeking to enrich themselves and enshrine their legacies. In the years since, they’ve convinced the rest of us that it is normal. The biggest problem with why 9/11 has become something so divisive on its own based on generation differences is because of what we did as a nation afterwards.
We have a duty to our nation to truly honor the sacrifices of all of the victims: the innocents who were taken from us because of hatred and fanaticism, and the heroes who stepped up to rescue as many of those people as they possible could at the cost of their own lives. America has not yet wrestled with the negative effects of 9/11. But what gives me hope is that I believe it still can. Contrition and reconciliation can only come with recognition. It is very late to have these revelations, but it is truly better late than never. The part of America that showed itself in the aftermath of 9/11 which didn’t persist is the America we should still strive to be. Not the America that turned against is Muslim neighbors out of fear, but the America that organized food drives and fundraisers and support for its wounded neighbors. We have acted too much like the former America and not enough of the latter in the last 25 years.
But it is not too late for us. Our cynicism towards 9/11 has come from two-and-a-half decades of our politicians, pundits, leaders, opinion-makers, and others using it as a justification for whatever the hell they want while never following through. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani dropped documents today detailing how city officials lied in the aftermath about the toxicity of the air around Ground Zero. Decades of city officials lying or keeping this buried because they didn’t want to admit that leadership perpetrated a massive fraud. People got sick and died because of how toxic the air was. While it is entirely too little, and entirely too late, it can also be the first stroke of a new chapter in the post-9/11 era of America. The first step of America owning its crimes in the wake of 9/11, and honoring this horrific event’s true importance to the history of the nation, and doing right by the memories of the victims and the suffering of their families.
Our healing and reconciling cannot just end with this generation. Future generations need to understand the reasons why 9/11 happened just as much as they need to understand the decisions we made in its aftermath. The only way to start is to accurately, and in detail, teach them about the events of the day. I think, honestly, that we need to make moves now to immortalize the events of that day in a visceral way with the input from as many survivors as possible. It comes across as cravenly taking advantage of a national tragedy to make entertainment. But I think that there’s something different about dramatic recreations of events that a documentary cannot quite hit. It explains and draws the emotions out of the audiences, and could be the way to make younger generations understand what the country went through on that day. It could provide a connection to the generation that came afterwards in a way that they understand the full weight of the day.
It is not too late to honor September 11th, 2001 in the right ways, and to chart a course which tries to make up for our horrible sins in its aftermath. It won’t be instantaneous, it won’t be perfect, but if we listen to the past and learn the right lessons echoing throughout the last two and a half decades, I believe that there is an America we can built that answers George Bush’s question with a resounding “Yes.”
Ark of the Lost Angels 
Leave a comment