Twenty Years Later
By Albert B. Kelly
I’ve been thinking about the 9/11 anniversary that just passed and how that tragedy changed us. It occurs to me that there is a whole generation of young people that knows of 9/11 only as a piece of history, a date to be memorized with facts and images but not much more. That’s not a criticism, just an observation that a whole lot of time has passed since that Tuesday morning back in 2001.
What is unfortunate for those who were either not yet alive or too young to have experienced the profound shock of 9/11 is that they have no sense of the before and the after of 9/11. This is true of every generation and their connection to their times. For those too young to be moved by the Kennedy assassination, we’ll never know what it felt like to live in the America of November 21, 1963 and then the America of November 22, 1963. The same can be said of Pearl Harbor and the America of December 6, 1941 and the America of December 7, 1941.
I regret that I did not appreciate nor did I even give much thought to that span of time between the collapse of the Berlin Wall and communism in 1989 and September 10, 2001. It is only in hindsight and in comparing that span of time to the world after 9/11 that I recognize that this twelve year span was better than we realized. During that span of time America stood alone as the world’s only superpower.
We dispatched Iraq with ease in the Gulf War, stopped genocide in the Balkins, and enjoyed a period of relative peace and prosperity in the 1990’s that eludes us now. I’m not saying it was some type of care free golden age; we had our problems, but it did not feel like the very foundations of our nation and our way of life were unraveling at the seams. There were still lines that wouldn’t be crossed and a core set of American beliefs that gave us strength and comfort.
All that and more was true as the sun set on Monday evening, September 10, 2001. But everything changed the following morning. We suffered a grievous wound that day and while much has been covered over by scar tissue and scabs, I’m not at all sure we can say we’ve healed. We lost 2,977 souls that day, but we also lost our sense of safety and security. The attack was an attack on our homeland on regular people doing everyday things.
Instinctively, perhaps for the last time, we came together. For weeks and months afterward, there was unity and solidarity amongst Americans along with a seriousness of purpose, a sobriety of thought, and a sense of humility after we realized just how fragile our lives can be. That was twenty years ago and that unity, solidarity, and sobriety is beyond our reach twenty years later.
I say that because as I write this, we’ve lost some 677,731 Americans to Covid-19. There is unimaginable mourning and grief and suffering in our country, but the grieving is done house by house and family by family. People cry alone because we can’t even agree that the pandemic is real, or that masks work, or that vaccines save lives. We haven’t seen a death toll in the homeland like this since the Civil War in the 1860s.
At a time when we need that sense of American unity, American seriousness of purpose, American solidarity, and American sobriety, we can’t find it. Out instincts have dulled. There may be many reasons why, but I suspect that part of it has to do with the fact that unlike 9/11, the pandemic lacks a single public event that we all watch with shock and horror and fear, so we lack that sense of humility that comes before everything else.
Twenty years later, I miss who and what we were as a nation and how we could be when it counted most. Today, we tolerate and even celebrate incivility, mock expertise, consider humility a weakness, and label anything we don’t agree with as “fake news”. Who knows if today’s young will ever find that sense of American unity, seriousness of purpose, solidarity, and sobriety that past generations always somehow found on the edges of history. We can only hope.