On September 11, 2001, I was eighteen. I had lately moved out of my parents’ house and started my college career. Looking at a calendar, the first day of classes must have been the previous Tuesday, September 4. My first lecture on Tuesdays was modern Hebrew at 9:50am, so my roommate woke me up when she got back to our room sometime between 8 and 8:30.
“Someone flew a plane into the World Trade Center.”
I did not process this at all. I think I said, “On purpose?” and possibly, “Are we going to have a war?” She didn’t know. No one knew anything. This had never happened before. The whole thing felt absurd–in fact, a few months previously I had watched an episode of an X-Files spinoff in which the heroes prevented a plane from flying into the World Trade Center. And I had once read, possibly in Reader’s Digest, an account of the 1993 bombing. Why was there so much interest in those buildings? I wondered muzzily.
I didn’t really know what I was supposed to do. Eventually, I went to class. My professor had turned up, along with some of the students. The prof was crying. Her son lived in New York, I think, and she couldn’t get hold of him. All the phone lines were down. People was distraught. We were half a country away from the site of the attacks. We could do nothing.
I remember the time in bits and pieces, all jumbled together. I remember standing in the cafeteria watching some reporting about the stock market–this must have been a week later when trading started again, and the Dow had its worst-ever one day loss. Someone joked, phlegmatically, “There goes my tuition.” I remember–I think this was in the evening on the 11th–a bunch of kids at the dorms ordering a pizza, and it took three hours to arrive. The driver blamed gas prices, which had immediately shot up. At some point I spoke on the phone to my father? or possibly we emailed, and he said the Sears Tower had been evacuated as a precaution. After a while, the skies were quiet. The only thing I can compare it to was the early COVID lockdown, a sense of isolation and quiet, of bad things happening somewhere else. I remember seeing a TV shot of people walking in New York (over a bridge?) and the mayor’s voice saying “If you are in Lower Manhattan, get out.”
In the weeks after, things were confusing. I wasn’t really a political person yet (I mean, I had liberal political views, but I wasn’t really engaged with discourse at the time; I hadn’t been old enough to vote in the 2000 presidential election). People were attacking those they perceived to be Arab or Muslim, even Sikhs (who are generally neither). The only Muslim person I could remember meeting was a professor at Beloit College, who was American and had once been an Anglican priest before she converted. She was amazing. I worried about her.
In the news, no one had any more answers–were we going to war? With whom? Apparently this event had killed more people than Pearl Harbor. It seemed that someone should answer for it. But countries can’t go to war with specific people. That’s what legal systems are for.
I went to a protest, which was small and felt uncertain. On the TV, in the news, were contradictory points: the people who attacked us hated our freedom. We had to give up some of the freedom to be able to catch them. Who “they” were was unclear to me. The Patriot Act got passed. The Department of Homeland Security was created, and the TSA. The Authorization for the Use of Military Force passed. (I only found out about that one years later.) There was a strong sense of you should love your country. You should support the troops (even if you didn’t agree with the war). This is right, this is patriotic. Freedom. Right. Justice. Liberty. God. Love. Happiness. Apple Pie. If you didn’t believe the government, you were wrong and hated the country. What was wrong with you? Couldn’t you see what they’d done to us? You have to love the world that they hate. Whoever they are. Because if you’re not with us, you’re against us. Like they were.
You have to believe that someone knows what the right thing to do is. Turns out they didn’t.
A few weeks ago, my husband and I were driving somewhere and I mentioned I wasn’t sure what to make of the “America 250” flags I was seeing around. As I understand it, that one is a bipartisan effort (as opposed to the Trump-only one, “Freedom 250”). But flying a flag? It just seemed so unlikely to me that anyone in my generation might do that who wasn’t a total tool.
Back in July and August 2024, an entire lifetime after 9/11, when Kamala Harris was running for office and the Olympics were on, I thought what I was feeling was patriotism, maybe for the first time. There was a phenomenal sense of energy, of joy and love, the sense that we were on the right side of history and we were going to do something historic. Like Hunter S. Thompson wrote in one of my favorite passages from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda… You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.
And that, I think, was the handle–that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting–on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave…
So now, less than five years later [he was writing c.1971], you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high–water mark–that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
Now when I think about patriotism I wonder how anyone in my generation can feel it uncritically. All I’ve ever learned is that patriotism is the horns of the bull that’s about to gore you to death.