The meaning of 9/11

I had never seen my teacher look so anxious. With the click of a remote, she had managed to do in an instant what usually took her a minute of hushing and shushing: silence her rowdy kindergarten class. We sat criss-cross applesauce, staring up at the television, completely transfixed by what we saw. None of us knew what to make of the image: a boxy skyscraper with a tall white antenna, largely uninteresting save for a wide black gash that billowed ashen-gray smoke into the New York morning.

In retrospect, it seems odd, and maybe downright negligent, that my kindergarten teacher would have displayed the harrowing images of 9/11 to a vulnerable group of five- and six-year-olds. Memory is a wily creature and perhaps here mine deceives me. But my mother distinctly remembers pulling up to school that afternoon and asking, after giving me the tenderest hug I've ever received, if I knew what had happened that day. Apparently, I replied, "I know." As we drove home, she explained that a plane had also hit a building called the Pentagon only a two hours' drive north of where we lived in Virginia. The President had ordered that all planes flying in North American airspace be grounded. Our country was under attack.

That day, the Twin Towers crumpled into dust and with them a child’s faith in a just world.

"Evil" became more than the abstract concept I had heard about in Sunday school and read about in my favorite fairy tales. "Evil" made its way into the presidential lexicon — Bush declared in his 9/11 address, "Today, our nation saw evil" — and embedded itself in my worldview. Although the only life I had ever known was largely happy, I began to view the world in the starkly moral dichotomy of good and evil.

The next set of images to shuffle across our television screens were of war: terrorists swinging on monkey bars, explosions lighting up the Afghan night, men and women in camouflage uniforms waving goodbye to their loved ones. Although those images have long since faded from our television screens and maybe even from our memories, the war goes on. The United States military continues to serve in Afghanistan, operate drone strikes in neighboring Pakistan, launch bombing campaigns over ISIS territory in Iraq and Syria and carry out commando raids in the Horn of Africa. We are living in an age of perpetual conflict, a "long twilight struggle" against an ever-metastasizing terror.

The generations that grew up to newsreels of World War II or broadcasts from Vietnam might have worried that one day they too would be drafted into the fight. But our generation never had to worry. Even as the wars dragged on into our teenage years, we knew that we would never have to fight unless we wanted to. The 1 percent of Americans in our military shouldered the weight of the War on Terror, while the other 99 percent of us could choose to pay attention or to tune out. As Michael Ignatieff notes in his book “Virtual War,” never before has conflict been so effortless for politicians to initiate and so easy for the public to ignore.

Muslim Americans have also borne a significant burden since 9/11. They shoulder the heavy weight of having to defend their faith against daily slights and accusations. Despite President Bush's declaration at a Washington, D.C. mosque on September 17, 2001 that "The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam," anti-Muslim hate crimes spiked in the weeks following the attack. Today, these hate crimes occur five times more frequently than they did before 2001. And even in the face of alleged ongoing racial profiling at the hands of airport security and vitriolic rhetoric from politicians, Muslim Americans continue to condemn terrorism and a brave few even risk their lives to fight against it through their service in the U.S. military.

9/11 and its aftermath have shaped our generation’s perception of America and its place in the world. On my most cynical days, I wonder if the terrorists won. They led a few Americans to conclude that Islam was at war with America and a small subset of world’s Muslims to conclude that America was at war with Islam. They forced the United States to weigh a bleak calculus with even bleaker answers for American foreign and domestic policy: the launch of two wars abroad and the curtailment of civil liberties at home. They managed to make the country that had in its beloved Bill of Rights forbidden “cruel and usual punishment” turn to justifying the torture of its prisoners –waterboarding, “rectal feeding,” sleep deprivation lasting over a week – under the Orwellian language of “enhanced interrogation techniques.”