After September

Twenty-five years ago today al-Qaeda attacked the United States. Like most Americans of my generation I remember where I was: Mr. Jones’ biology class. He wheeled a cathode ray television on a squeaky cart to the front of the class and we saw the smoke drifting across lower Manhattan. I would not find out until years later, but one of my classmates was watching his brother die. He never spoke of it.

Recently, Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has come under fire from wingnut centrists for a 2021 tweet in which he compared the death toll of covid with that of 9/11, and called for a commensurate response. We are told he was debasing the memory of 9/11. Set aside the reasonableness of El-Sayed’s claim, set aside the rank Islamophobia of the accusation: it would be impossible to debase the memory of 9/11 more than it already has been. Consider the “Hooters Remembers” 9/11 collectible memorial pin, with its respectful “Let Freedom Wing” slogan, or the brief period in which politicians pretended to call french fries “freedom fries” as a protest against French opposition to the Iraq War—and of course consider the Iraq War itself, in which the Bush Administration constantly invoked the memory of 9/11 in order to lie its way into a war of choice that would kill more than half a million human beings.

For today’s children, 9/11 is at most something they learn about on some rushed day late in their social studies class. For those of us who lived it, it feels like everything that has happened since still lingers in the shadow of those burning towers, those plumes of smoke stretching across the skyline, the silence before the second strike.

But history rolls on. World War Two ended on September 2, 1945, when Japan signed the Instrument of Surrender aboard the USS Missouri as it rode at anchor in Tokyo Bay. For those who lived through WWII, it was the shadow which would define their lives. Twenty-five years later, The New York Times front page was concerned with the ongoing war in Vietnam, the recent bombing of UW-Madison by domestic terrorists to protest it, but more than either of those, by recent demographic changes in the populations of various states: look at that West Coast grow!

The world moves on. The much-heralded 21st century is already a quarter over. The grief lingers, and the mistakes cannot be overturned, and the dead do not return from their graves. Same as it ever was: the river of time flows ever onward, and the graveyards are full of indispensable men.

History is therefore a tool for the living. What remains to be learned from 9/11? Today I am struck by the contingency of things. These days we are all much in love with structural explanations; they have a certain satisfyingness to them, and can be fitted into this or that pleasant moral narrative. But sometimes shit just happens. One man pulls something off; another man fails to. And the whole arc of history bends.

That is worth reflecting on, in our uncertain times.

Featured Image is World Trade Center in the 1970s, by Mr.TinMD