9/11/01

       I was in the car, driving to work, with the radio on. Heard a short, truncated bulletin, got out of the car, turned on the television in the office and watched, mesmerized, the unfurling.

      It was 25 years ago.

      Where were you?

      You know, of course, exactly where you were, what you were doing. Because it was one of those moments, and there have only been a few during our lifetime, forever fixed in time. A moment when you can remember precisely what you were doing when you heard the news.

      For an earlier generation, it had been Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941; maybe when FDR died, April 12, 1945; or maybe V-J Day, Aug. 15, 1945.

For us, a slightly longer list:

To early boomers, like me, it’s Nov. 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy shot and killed in Dallas, Walter Cronkite taking his glasses off to utter the unthinkable news.

It’s April 4, 1968, another assassination, Martin Luther King, Jr. shot and killed in a motel in Memphis.

A little more than a year later, July 21, 1969, Neil Armstrong sets foot on the moon and we see it sort of live, in black and white.

  And of course, now 25 years ago, Sept. 11, 2001, when airplanes crashed into the World Trade Centers in New York.

      What happened after these moments in time is clear: JFK’s assassination robbed us of our innocence and became the turning point from the quietude of the ‘50s to the raucous explosions of the ‘60s and ‘70s. The murder of MLK unleashed fury in the streets and a long-time-coming reckoning over race. The moon landing changed our expectations of human possibility.

      And what has 9/11 done to us and for us?   

      It changed American life in ways both dramatic—shattering our common assumption that our country was impregnable and far removed from the dangerous turmoil of elsewhere—and surprisingly ordinary. Some of the changes, in fact, have become so routine we barely notice them anymore.

      Remember meeting friends and relatives at the airport gate? Remember walking with them to the gate to say goodbye? Those were the days when you didn’t have to take off your belt or empty your pockets or traipse through a security labyrinth before hitting the skybridge.

      It was also a time when you could go to a hospital or to a concert or a museum without having to pass through full-body scanners or have to open your bags for security people.  

      Back then, those security people weren’t everywhere and there weren’t concrete barriers around buildings, particularly government structures. There weren’t signs in subways and train stations urging us to “say something if you see something,” signs we barely notice now.

      But we do notice, and maybe wonder, when a package sits by itself on a bench or when someone looks different, maybe furtive. We indeed have become more suspicious—of packages and people.  

      We have, as well, become just a little bit inured to the harshness of public discourse, to public figures saying hateful things about those who are different from the majority.  

      Could all that—our suspiciousness, our sense of vulnerability, our intolerance—have led us inexorably to xenophobia and to … Trump?

      What once seemed excessive, beyond the pale, has gradually become normal. And 25 years ago seems both very distant and awfully close.

      [P.S.: It’s possible there are a few other transcendent moments in our lifetime where people will always remember where they were when they heard the news:

When John Lennon was shot and killed, Dec. 8, 1980

When the Challenger spacecraft exploded, Jan. 28, 1986

And for my father, it was when the call rang out that “The Giants Win the Pennant, The Giants Win the Pennant!” after Bobby Thomson hit “The shot heard round the world,” Oct. 3, 1951.]