One of the odd things I’ve observed on social media over the past week or so is a sort of stern lecturing from members of Gen Z towards millennials, with one viral post saying we have a “weird, worshipful attitude” towards the September 11 attacks, among other things.
Well, yes. How could you not have that kind of attitude towards a day that so clearly marked the end of one era and ushered in another? “Worshipful” does not seem like quite the right word, but it would be strange to pretend that 9/11 was just another day.
On September 11, 2001, I was 10 years old. I had no earthly idea what the Pentagon or World Trade Center was. I took the school bus home from fifth grade, excited that I would soon be getting a clarinet and finally learning to play an instrument. It was the day the forms were due.
My mother was sitting on the sofa, staring at the television, looking shell-shocked as it showed repeating images of… something. I had no idea how to interpret what I was seeing. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I remember her blank stare.
“They didn’t tell you?” she asked, in a tone that can only be described as drained.
“Tell me what?”
Suddenly, I remembered that my music teacher had been pulled out into the hallway earlier that day in the middle of class. She had refused to tell us what she had been told. This had to have been it.
My mother tried to explain that the country had been attacked. I don’t remember the specifics of what she said. But I remember the fear and confusion. I realised that the “World Trade Center” was also called the “Twin Towers”, which I recognised from a clip from Sesame Street, of all things. They were now gone.
Something called the Pentagon was near Washington, DC, and it had been hit too. A plane had crashed in Pennsylvania. The television kept showing a plane crashing into a building and a tower collapsing.
I began crying and screamed for my father, who, mercifully, was not out to sea as a merchant mariner at the time. He had gone for a bike ride, possibly to clear his mind after the events of that morning.
In the 25 years since September 11, I cannot recall another news event that has made me immediately break down crying and screaming. I suspect the shock of being completely oblivious to a major world event for several hours played a large role in my eventual pursuit of a career in news.
Like everyone else, though, I was glued to the television for the rest of the evening. It took me a while to process that there had been people on the plane that hit the South Tower, that those people were dead and that I had just watched them die dozens of times in a row.
In my defence, I was 10 years old. I was watching replays of a terrorist attack on television before I was allowed to watch a PG-13 film. Somehow, everything and nothing seemed real at the same time.
Later that evening, there were reports that someone called “bin Laden” was behind the horrors of the day. We had dinner outside on the deck because it was an unseasonably nice day. My brother’s primary-school picnic had been cancelled. I didn’t understand why.
The attacks were over. From my perspective, New York City was so foreign to my southern Maine upbringing that it might as well have been on another planet. We were far removed from everything.
As the dust, literally and figuratively, settled, we would come to find out that we were not so removed after all. Several of the terrorists, including the ringleader, had spent the last days of their lives in my hometown. They had begun their journey towards the September 11 attacks at a tiny regional airport about a 15-minute drive from my house – the same airport I had flown from with my family earlier that year to go to Walt Disney World.
They had gone to the Pizza Hut by the mall, the one in front of the cinema where I had seen The Princess Diaries a few weeks earlier. They had gone to our Walmart, the one where I would eventually work as a teenager. (By then it had moved across the street; the Walmart’s 2001 location is now a surplus store.)
One would think that a Maine town of fewer than 17,000 people would be the last place on earth to have a brush with radical Islamic terrorism. Somehow, that was not the case. We still don’t know why they chose to spend time in Scarborough and South Portland, and likely never will.
I’ve always felt a bit like a phoney when it comes to writing about September 11 and its aftermath. I didn’t grow up in the DC area or New York. I didn’t know anyone who was killed.
The next day at school, I was a confused, frightened 10-year-old in a sea of confused, frightened 10-year-olds wondering what on earth had just happened.
But nothing felt safe any more. Lockdown drills were soon introduced at school. My school circus group’s planned performance in the 2002 National Independence Day Parade in DC was scrapped. Everything seemed dangerous. Everything seemed like a potential target. I was convinced I was going to die on my next family holiday.
It wasn’t rational. But at that point, what was? The September 11 attacks were the end of America’s obliviousness, the end of its innocence. They were also the end of mine, at the ripe old age of 10.
It was a lot for a 10-year-old to absorb: not only was there an ideology that hated me for existing – as an American, as a Catholic, as a Westerner – but also, people who subscribed to that ideology and were prepared to die for it and kill for it had been shopping at my Walmart earlier that week.
In the days immediately after September 11, the slogan “Never Forget” was everywhere. Now, as the last generation that was old enough to remember the attacks reaches adulthood, it is more important than ever to explain just what was lost on that September day.
