Ground Zero this morning, courtesy Douglas Kurdziel. He said he believes the white tent was where the events were held. I just like that you can spot the flag in the upper left.
The weather on September 11, 2001 was perfect. Anyone from Washington to New York will tell you this. The Mid-Atlantic lives for the NFC East and perfect fall days — clear, crisp, weightless, with dark blue skies and tinting leaves — and September 11 was one of them.
They announced that the Twin Towers and the Pentagon had been hit with airplanes during my third period Algebra I class. One girl started crying because her father worked at the Pentagon. Others were pulled out of school quickly. Later, after the 9/11 commission was released, the documents showed the original plans for the attacks included about a dozen more sites, largely in Washington D.C. and California. One of them was the CIA, which is about four miles from my house, and less than a mile from my high school (Langley High School). In February of 2002, we visited New York on a school trip, and saw Ground Zero. For blocks, the buildings were black. Things could have been very different.
When I got home from school on September 11, though, my mother was upset, and so I sat Indian-style on our driveway, waiting for my brother to get home from school. We live between Reagan and Dulles airport, so a quiet sky is unnatural, especially on a day so clear. It was very, very quiet. And it stayed that way until October.
At some point in the week following 9/11, and I don’t remember saying this, but I asked my mother, “When is this all going to be over?” Well, it never was going to be, but 13 year-olds don’t understand history when it’s happening.
For Generation Y, September 11 created illusions we might not have had otherwise. Because it so splintered and shattered the Great American Axiom — that we were safe and invincible — the 1990s became a utopia, crisp and weightless, like cheap champagne. There was community then, we were safe then, our problems were simple.
For those now aged 19 to 24, September 11 divides the Good with the Bad. Iraq, Katrina, Virginia Tech, and the economic collapse all followed, ticking away in succession, marching to some unclear conclusion. Bad things happened in the 2000s, and Generation Y hasn’t quite decided how to respond.
The Dark Knight defined a dark decade. Music lost its cotton candy sheen; Britney Spears lost her mind. Drugs, hard liquor, and late-night Adderall fuel college students, but so do Teach For America, Evangelist mission work and the Peace Corps. Is it Texts from Last Night or Paul’s Letters? Barack Obama captured the need for cohesion and unity — for hope and change, because this is a generation that knew it lost something, even if it cannot define what exactly it was, even if it drives us to false community.
“When is this all going to be over?”
Unfortunately, it’s never over.
UPDATE: Three Four links on the eighth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, and they are all far more poignant than this post:
- Sarah Bunting is searching for the stranger, Don, who she befriended in Manhattan on September 11, 2001 as they attempted to get out of downtown alive that day.
- Allah Pundit, the Hot Air blogger, described his memories from his Village apartment on the day of the attacks in a series of Twitter posts last night. It is extremely powerful, and not for the faint of heart. (You may need to scroll back several pages to see the posts.) UPDATE: Andy Levy collected all the posts and put them in order here.
- President Bush’s address to the nation on the night of the attacks. It is still a comfort.
- ADDED: Peggy Noonan wrote about exactly this Generation 9/11 (hat tip on that name to Kleinheider) idea today. She did it way better, y’all. But in general this post is a sketch of a larger essay I want to do (“Blackout: Generation 9/11 and the Battle with Good & Evil in the Aughts”), so there will be more.
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