Today marks 20 years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It was a pivotal event in history: like the JFK assassination or the Apollo 11 moon landing, everyone who lived through it seems to remember where they were when it happened.
I know I remember. On 09/11/2001, I was a sophomore at a college in North Carolina, 500 miles away from the Twin Towers.
This past week, I’ve heard plenty of people telling the stories of where they were and what they did that day.
This is mine.
September 11th, 2001. A Tuesday. I was a second-year engineering student, living on the third floor of a dorm on West Campus.
My usual Tuesday routine was to wake up, shower, heat a Hot Pocket in the microwave, and then scald the roof of my mouth while checking the morning news on my PC. CNN. ABCNews. FoxNews. Those were my top three go-to news sites at the time (and I don’t remember any of them having nearly the bias they have today).
But that morning, none of the news sites would load. Neither would several other sites I frequented. A few would partly load, then fail. Most simply timed out.
Odd, but not alarming. This was the year 2001, and “the internet is down” sounded more plausible than it does today.
I decided to leave for class a little early. My schedule included three classes back-to-back-to-back, so I collected all the notebooks I needed and walked to my first class.
Good old Roshankleboal Hall room 429.
(The building isn’t actually named Roshankleboal Hall, but because it was named after a racist and white supremacist, my university (understandably) removed the name from the building in 2020, and (less understandably) not yet come up with a new name as of 2021. So I’ll just call it Roshankleboal Hall, which is a perfectly cromulent name for a university building. You understand, right?)
I knew this classroom well: a corner lecture hall that could seat two-hundred. (And in the college of engineering, that usually meant about 196 guys and 4 girls.) This meant that virtually every large class I had was scheduled in this room. I spent more of my college career in Roshankleboal 429 than I did in the library.
For this class, I typically sat about four rows from the back, on the left half of the hall as seen from the front.
Microelectronics class was big and anonymous: I barely knew anyone in it, and studied my notes from the last lecture rather than talking to anyone.
But I could tell that the mood this morning was different. People were talking in hushed whispers. I caught something about “New York”. “Planes”. “Up to 50,000 people.”
The instructor entered class.
“Are we going to have class today?” asked someone in the front.
“Of course,” said the professor. “Why wouldn’t we have class?” He seemed baffled at the question (so was I). Later I found out that he, too, had not yet heard what had happened.
Microelectronics class started. Microelectronics class ended.
My next class was Digital Design, in the same lecture hall, though I always got up and moved to the right side, middle of the room. Just to change things up.
The instructor entered the class.
“In case you haven’t heard,” he said, “There has been a terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York. Both towers have collapsed, a lot of people have died. We are still going to have class.”
(My immediate reaction was: that’s not funny. I assumed he was exaggerating a small scale event, akin to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.)
Digital Design class started. Digital Design class ended.
I walked to the third of my back-to-back-to-back classes, several buildings over.
Here’s a funny coincidence.
(Not ha-ha funny. Just coincidental.)
This next class was one of my humanities classes: a seminar on International Politics.
It was taught by a Doctor with a last name similar to globalist billionaire investor philanthropist George Soros, whom he jokingly called “Uncle George”.
(No relation. Just another coincidence.)
Remember how I mentioned the 1993 World Trade Center bombing? That’s because it was fresh in my mind: we had been reading about it the previous week. Our textbook described who the terrorists were in that bombing, how they had planned it, how they escaped afterward, and how they were caught.
The book’s author went on to argue that there are currently multiple types of civilization in the world. Western Civilization, with its focus on individual rights and freedom, is very different from Eastern Civilization, which values community and conformity, and is very different again from Islamic Civilization, which follows the precepts of that religion.
The author further argued that perceived inequities created what the author called “angry men”, who felt wronged by external forces and longed to lash out, using religion as an excuse.
And further, that convenient access to western technology created what the author called “super empowered angry men”, who had not only the desire to lash out at the west, but the means to do so.
VHS video was still a thing in 2001, and the professor had recorded some TV news clips. He played them for the class.
There, in a room with a dozen other students, for the first time, I saw it.
I watched the planes hit the towers.
Watched the fires burn.
Watched the towers collapse.
Saw smoke from the Pentagon.
Just a few days ago, “super empowered angry men” were a distant concept. Academic. We talked about them in class.
Now we could see it for ourselves. And it wasn’t an embassy in some faraway capital.
It was a hole in the heart of our largest city.
I could tell from the others’ faces that I was not the only one who was seeing 9/11 for the first time.
International Politics class ended early. The professor tried to strike up a halfhearted discussion related to our textbook, but we were stunned, and he must have seen he was fighting a losing battle.
The rest of the afternoon is a fog. After class I went back to my dorm.
I wrote an email to my parents letting them know that I was safe (why wouldn’t I be?).
I set an away message on AIM. (AOL Instant Messenger. That was a thing in 2001.)
My roommate and I watched the TV news, read the internet news, and speculated.
Domestic terrorists?
Definitely not.
A Palestinian group is claiming responsibility.
Oh, now they’ve retracted.
We’re definitely going to war. I wonder if they’ll reinstate the draft?
Did I eat lunch that day? Dinner at the dining hall? Did I go anywhere later that afternoon? Did I talk to friends? I can’t remember anymore.
I know that later in the evening, probably around 7:00 PM, I went to my first lab session for electronics class. I probably wandered around a while to find the lab in the basement of Roshankleboal Hall. The teaching assistant probably introduced himself. I probably had a lab partner. We probably breadboarded a simple electronic circuit.
It was probably as close to normal as I’d been since I watched the Twin Towers fall.
But it wasn’t normal. Normal was over.
Twenty years.
In the aftermath, everything happened.
President Bush stood at Ground Zero with a bullhorn and vowed, “the people that knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!”
Firefighters, doctors, nurses, rescue workers were heroes. The news cycle was filled with images repeated and burned into my memory. A flag at Ground Zero. The Falling Man. Voicemail transcripts from Flight 93.
Air travel was nonexistent for two days. There’s a video online that shows continental US air traffic on 9/11. It’s eerie to see the entire country go dark. To see lines of jetliners on the ground in Canada.
The hijackers were identified and linked to al-Quaeda, and to a man named Osama bin Laden. (Wasn’t he linked to that pharmaceutical factory that Clinton bombed? Yes. And the 1993 WTC bombing. And…)
The PATRIOT ACT was passed.
The Department of Homeland Security was created. (I was always slightly unnerved by the word “Homeland”. Shades of “Motherland” or “Fatherland”.)
The TSA was created. Airport security became a complicated theater of putting liquids in small enough containers in appropriately-sized baggies. No more walking to the gate with your loved one. No more waiting at the gate for your loved one to arrive.
I was groped / patted-down by TSA agents many, many times.
I almost had a screwdriver and Allen wrench set confiscated by a TSA agent.
We went to war in Afghanistan. We watched the march of progress on the evening news as we took each major city.
We more controversially went to war in Iraq.
Ground Zero was cleaned up. A new tower was built.
AOL discontinued AIM (AOL Instant Messenger). But by then, few remembered that AIM was a thing, and most were surprised that AOL was still a thing.
We elected the first black President.
We elected the first orange President.
We elected Walter the Puppet as President.
A disastrous pull-out in Afghanistan ended twenty years of US occupation there, and left Americans and our Afghan allies to the nonexistent mercies of a resurgent Taliban.
(Not necessarily all in that order.)
September 11th, 2021. Twenty years. I bow my head and close my eyes for the thousands of innocent people who died that day, and the American soldiers who have fought to keep us safe since then.
Much has happened in twenty years, but so much is uncertain. Did we go to far in prioritizing national security over civil rights? Have we made the world safer? Were the trillions of dollars spent in military conflict worthwhile?
I don’t know the answers.
But I’ll echo a sentiment that I expressed to my roommate, twenty years ago today, while watching the TV news.
If we’re going to spend a couple trillion dollars, we ought to spend a couple trillion dollars on building a Mars colony, raise a giant American flag over it, and give the terrorists the middle finger.
pmcoltrane 