Forgetting September 11th: The Day That Never Ended

Timothy
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I am 23 years old. On September 11th, 2001, I was in 8th grade and I was barely alive. I remember hearing the news about the first tower over a loudspeaker, and I remember being lined up and walked into the science classroom with the rest of my grade to watch second of the towers being hit. I remember seeing the towers burn and collapse as it happened on television. But I'm not even completely sure at what point in the process we began watching, how long we stayed in the humidity of that room, or exactly who I sat next to. I don't remember many words or faces. I do remember that my sister and father were in New York City visiting colleges, but I can't quite recall that uncomfortable pit in my stomach the way I should, even though the relief of hearing that they were okay sticks with me. Despite my lack of details, what I do know is that I should remember more; considering I watched most of the televised hours showing the horror that occurred that day.

What I can remember has more to do with the significance of that day for my generation than the one emotion I felt at the time. I hate to make such a profoundly dumb statement, but as my class was lined up by our shaken teacher and trudged through the hallway, it did not feel all that unlike how it might have felt to be a Jew in the Holocaust being walked towards a gas chamber. It felt like we were walking to our doom: "Come on, come on, let's watch the end of our world!" It was how I felt, but despite its foolishness I still know now that it should have felt more like being walked towards an internment train, considering the how the events that followed have affected our world and our country. But that is beside the point.


Instead of the event, what I remember most strongly isn't even a memory of my own: it was simply knowing that not every teacher had allowed their class to come watch it happen. In that, it was to know that our world wasn't what it seemed to be: it was instead determined by what we were told, and what we were allowed to see. So I really can't remember much beyond the numbness of that humble reality: we were not the heirs of an explicitly safe empire, born to be invincible rulers of the world. We were not on an island or tall hill, separate from but vital to the rest of the world. We were playing king of the hill, and when we got older we would not graduate to be the shining crusaders of freedom, but the false knights defending the hill they can't back off from. War, not peace, was an undeniable reality, and we would have casualties whether we chose to defend it or not.

This realization happened, so unexpectedly, but so crushingly obvious and inevitable. At least, that's how I see it now: that moment became the definitive event of my generation's childhood not because of the facts of the moment itself, but because it so definitively ended any aspirations we had to remain children. It was true, whether we chose to recognize it or not. What we all saw was that no country is an island, and the world would affect it with or without consent. That also meant the same when applied individually to our families and even our innocent, half-formed selves. We could believe in illusions, or accept mortality... accept change, and death. It was something we hadn't even started to realize until that day, but it was so clearly true that we either had to incorporate it into ourselves or completely deny it in a fit of selfish fury.

But that is the natural outcome to the ultimate black swan event, whether for a shortsighted foreign policy or for a generation's sense of safety. Young people of my generation can be left with images, feelings, and fragments of ideas about what that day was like and what it meant - but what we are really left with is the sense of a vastly changed world, at a time when we were barely beginning to form a perception of what the world was like. What we are left with is the feeling that at any time, and at any moment, what we perceive the world to be and how we relate to it can be shattered.

Our trust of reality is disfigured - in a sense, seeing only the effects of massive disillusionment in our elders at such a crucial time has just meant that any unforeseen events, any omitted truths, any imperceptible lies are rote and unsurprising. It is fundamental to our mentality that anything can change and any illusion or belief is fragile at best. We are as immovable and desensitized as we are aware of how vulnerable our world and our place in it can be. That first seed of distrust in the fabric of society was not so much a jarring incident that changed our behavior as it is a uniform part of our worldview. 

In a sense, that is what makes us so blind to the follies of our civilization and its decisions. We expect to be deceived, and we expect our efforts to seed change to fail, deep within our bones. As a part of the American tradition, we were done the disservice of being kept sheltered in a world increasingly more connected. In folly our caretakers and institutions tried nobly to coddle and protect us, yet in the process they forgot to convey the reality of the world their actions had created. They knew that there would be events that would splash over to us, yes, but for them, nothing was quite as unexpected as something so local. Such an instant was so unexpected our elders had never thought to prepare themselves for it, let alone their children, and thus when it happened my naive generation was shell-shocked into immobility. 

Frozen and fetal still, what will happen to us? Our elders have forgotten, or maybe they just didn't figure out that we never learned to see the world the way they did? Maybe that's the mistake: we were taught that things are supposed to be easy by people who knew they wouldn't be. The self-mantra of creating illusions for our children can deceive us too. By devoting themselves so fully to forming a reality that they should have known to be untrue as a byproduct of their experience, our leaders, parents, and teachers betrayed their own lack of judgment, their own capacity for being deceived. After learning that our elders could be wrong to the point of fatal vulnerability and embarrassing contradiction, in an instant everything they had taught us to believe seemed questionable.

I feel a profound loss, even in forgetting. It is at a depth which I may fail to ever comprehend because it is core to the way my generation came into the world. That loss is the void of an imaginary world that only existed within us, a vanishing magnified by the fear and chaos of seeing the inevitable truth in our elders' eyes before we were meant to see it for ourselves. So as our country wonders why day after day, as the world moves on, we can complacently take to the merciless beat of change remaining still and untouched, we know that this is because September 11th is a day that has never ended.

So now each member of my generation makes a choice: we either try to preserve the false world that we thought was real or we try to fight to change the real, flawed world into a better one. In that, there is the difference between a child and an adult. However, it is our fear that leads us to the current state of insensitivity and passive nonchalance in the face of incredible adversity. That's the one undeniable legacy we have been left by September 11th, but it can't make us forget the inate ugliness of the world and the need for a response.

Just days ago, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that "the share of young people who were employed in July was 48.8 percent, the lowest July rate on record for the series, which began in 1948." Undoubtedly, this is not something that can last for long. Perhaps our elders believe that if this is an unjust burden, it is our conventional duty as American youth to struggle to change it: "God helps those who help themselves." Or maybe, out of greed or ignorance, those with power have forced this situation onto us. Perhaps this passes with time, whether the plans of the powerful succeed or fail. Or perhaps nothing will change, and the current lack of coherent outcry from my generation has already written off our ability to fix it.

Either way, I think we know that at some point we will have to wake up from our fetal sleep to protect our place on the shrinking American hill. We have already seen the island collide with reality, perhaps more vividly than any generation of recent decades. Time will tell whether we are an exceptionally stillborn or profoundly aware generation as a result of September 11th: we might not seem like the conscious, proactive generations of years past, but I can still hold out hope for us yet. Whether we remember the day that never ended or not, its lesson has taught us something that we will always carry with us: in this world, things happen the hard way.