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A Brief Reflection on September 11th, 2001, From Someone Who Does Not Remember It

I am too young to remember the September 11th attacks, but I remember, vaguely, the Iraq War – not the start of it, mind you, but I remember watching the news and thinking that the Iraqis were the “baddies” and we were the “goodies”. (Of course, the real world isn’t so black and white.)
 
The first major news event I can remember are the July 7th bombings in 2005, almost four years later. My mother missed my sports day because she spent the day by the telephone, waiting to hear that my father and my cousin were safe. (They were.) I was distraught. I wanted to show my mother how good I was at sports and make her proud. Kids are like that. They don’t do big-picture.

I, in fact, did not know about September 11th – did not fully grasp it – until I was a teenager. Perhaps I had been shielded from it, consciously or unconsciously, by my parents and grandparents. But the years following it affected me. I remember making a little newspaper at my paternal grandmother’s house, a fake red-top tabloid (my father used to read The Sun). I do not recall the headline I chose for my fictitious news story, but I drew a little tank and a figure in hooded clothes, and I wrote beneath it something to the effect of: “Reports are coming in that the Irakies [sic] are attacking us!”

Alas. I was a child. Exposed to the news cycle. Iraq was our Vietnam. We didn’t know.

 
I have grown up in a world completely different to the one my parents and grandparents knew, a time of permanent existential anxiety and ideological collapse. 9/11 cannot be compared accurately to the Titanic or to Pearl Harbor. Those were tragedies, but not generation-defining collective traumatic wounds on our unified consciousness. 9/11 was unique among disasters in that it was the incident that came to define every year that succeeded it.
 
Since September 11th 2001, we have seen governments slide slowly into nationalist fervour and proto-fascism. States of emergency have become normalised. Terrorism is our new normal, a permanent fixture in our tapestry, occasionally erupting, like an ever-angry volcanic hellmouth, stealing away our friends, our spouses, our parents and our children. There is always the fear that September 11th will happen again. That it could happen again. Like some primal monster awakened within us, seared into our brains, haunting our dreams.

Devastation on such a scale preceded September 11th 2001, of course. The Holocaust, for example, which has left wounds on the collective Jewish identity that are long yet to heal. Yet, 9/11 seems to be a different kind of spectre, haunting us unconsciously everywhere we go. There is nothing that has not been touched by that day’s dreadful tendrils. It is the measuring stick against which all 21st-century tragedy is measured; The Big One, the worst thing imaginable. Three thousand lives, the weight of every one, weighing on us – those few who saw the end of the twentieth century dream of everlasting liberal-democratic peace unfold before their eyes, but did not live to see the fallout of its implosion.

I am too young to remember the September 11th attacks, but I have felt its effects and aftershocks. I still do. We all do. We are a generation of chaos-children, those of us too young to remember 9/11 but too old to have completely escaped its immediate after effects. We do not remember what it was like before those days. We have only ever known chaos.

For the most part, seventeen years on, it feels in some ways that the world has moved on from that day. September 11th 2018 passed just as mundanely as September 11th 2000. September 11th was only ever supposed to be that. Another day in September. Another normal day.

Yet it is always overshadowed. It will be perhaps for another sixty or so years.

It is the day the world stopped making sense.

It is the day the future was cancelled.