23 Years Later:

I Don't Think We've Done Enough

9/11 does not feel like 23 years ago to me. It feels so recent, more recent than things that happened 5 or 10 years ago.

Last winter, I heard a young woman refer to her college friends who know a lot about 9/11 as “people interested in history.”

WHAT?!?

It wasn’t that 9/11 is already described as “historical” that most shocked me. It’s that our current youth don’t seem to hold it in their headspace the way my generation grasped the devastating events that occurred prior to our births. The assassinations of JFK and MLK, for instance. Or the Vietnam War.

How many movies and shows were revisiting those horrors long before a full 23 years passed? So many! When I was growing up, our daily lives were inundated with cultural references, both subtle and direct, about Vietnam. Vietnam was THE container for ongoing television shows.

I can barely think of anything holding 9/11 in a narrative. I recall Jonathan Safran Foer wrote a novel. I know there are others because I checked Google, but nothing strikes me as a powerful enough piece of art, something that would help educate those who can’t forget because they never knew. There’s the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, but that’s not easily accessible to everyone. Even if it were, a single location doesn’t permeate ongoing conversation. A television series sustains relevance.

Am I wrong? What am I missing?

When Osama Bin Laden started favorably trending on social media following October 7th, I realized we haven’t done a good job educating the younger ones.

Perhaps our invasion of Iraq created so much collective guilt, we’ve transformed it into suicidal empathy for our enemies?

I don’t understand.

I will never forget the horrors of 9/11. I accept that our democracy has flaws, but we also have progress despite our many setbacks. Our mistakes are not equivalent to radical Islamist terror.

The extremism we’re now enduring on both ends of our political spectrum doesn’t even come close to what women and other marginalized groups suffer in other parts of the world.

I hope this anniversary, we remember our strengths and celebrate the many achievements of Western Civilization. I’m so tired of the self-hatred here. It’s arrogant and entitled and disrespectful.

Maybe we need more stories about September 11th and its aftermath.

Thinking of all my friends who lost loved ones that day. And of my hometown in Manhasset, NY, where the death toll was unfathomable. All the cars that never drove home from the train station that night. The smoke in the air. My friends that escaped the city and the immediate area.

For details about the impact of 9/11 on my hometown, read this piece from 2002 in the LA Times written by J. R. Moehringer (Prince Harry’s ghostwriter).