Growing Up 9/11

A quarter century of disbelief.

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Evan Gottesman is the director of communications and special projects at the Renew Democracy Initiative and managing editor of The Next Move.

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“The dog died” and “dad lost his job”—these were the two guesses I recall offering up when my mom declared, open-endedly, that “something very bad” happened as I climbed into her minivan after school.

I was six years old on September 11, 2001, and the borders of my imagination did not extend to the type of carnage that had unfolded not too far from my suburban New Jersey hometown.

In fairness, I don’t think the adults in my life could have conceived of it either. Something fundamental shattered for them, too. For a long time, I didn’t appreciate that 9/11 was a fresh sort of horror.

There had been kamikaze attacks, when Japanese pilots crashed their single-seat propeller planes into the decks of Allied ships. There were airplane hijackings, in which passengers would be held for ransom. And, more recently, there had been suicide bombings.

Never before September 11 had these distinct modes of violence been combined. My dad, who watched things unfold from his Manhattan office, later told me that he assumed the people behind the attacks had somehow flown the planes by remote control.

For my parents, the idea of evil men flying jetliners loaded with civilians into office buildings abruptly entered the realm of Things That Can Happen. Growing up, I took for granted that this kind of attack was normal rather than novel. I hate that.

The words “terrorism” or “hijacking” were probably not in my lexicon when I started the first grade a few days before 9/11, but I quickly intuited their meanings. I heard “al Qaeda” and “Osama bin Laden” spoken by grown-ups with their backs turned, in snippets of TV news reports, and on the radio.

Of course, I didn’t really understand what had happened (reader, remember that I was six). Instead, I experienced 9/11 in slow motion, another awful revelation dawning on me each passing anniversary. This turned September 11 into something between a dull, throbbing pain and a fixation. What those old enough to “get it” had to reckon with all at once has dragged out for me over a quarter century.

Part of this was unavoidable. As a kid in New Jersey during the early aughts, 9/11 was ubiquitous.

Yes, it was a national tragedy, but in New Jersey it was personal. More people from our state were killed than from any other, save New York. It was impossible not to know someone, or at least know someone who knew someone, who’d lost a friend or relative or colleague, or nearly lost one, someone who got to work too late or too early.

One of my uncles almost died; my dad found him covered in ash after the towers collapsed. Another uncle was at Windows on the World, the North Tower’s 107th-floor restaurant, the evening before the attacks. He raced home as my aunt went into labor. Their son, my cousin, was born the next morning.

In the months after 9/11, two blue benches were erected on the school playground, with plaques bearing the names of parents who died in the Trade Center.

I contrast these experiences against my wife’s. She grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and was the only one in her class whose family was affected (like the children of many Soviet Jewish immigrants, she has relatives in Brooklyn).

I took things a step further. As I got older, I pored over books about the attacks. With the advent of YouTube, I spent more hours than I care to admit watching news broadcasts and amateur footage from 9/11. When I was in sixth grade, my English teacher called home to question my choice of Twin Towers: The Life of New York City’s World Trade Center for a book report (in college, I took a course about 9/11 taught by the author, Angus Kress Gillespie).

My parents would explain this by pointing to an obsessive streak in my personality that has long had me collecting odds and ends and bits of trivia; this was just another subject (however grim) to learn everything about. That might have been true when I was younger, but nowadays when I think about September 11 it’s less morbid curiosity that has me preoccupied and more disbelief; disbelief that something like this had actually happened, and so close to home.

If my brain were wired a little bit differently, I might have taken to the conspiracy theories that cropped up almost as soon as the towers fell. (Around the fifth anniversary of the attacks, I read the comprehensive debunking of those theories published in Popular Mechanics. More age-appropriate middle school reading.) Today, a new generation is embracing an old set of alternative facts about 9/11. Perhaps they share that sense of disbelieving dread and don’t know what to do with it.

For me, the greatest shock came at my first job after college, more than a decade and a half after September 11. I was working in New York, sitting at my desk, when a thought flashed across my mind: all of those people had been killed at their desks. I find something especially dehumanizing in the notion of dying on the job.

There are other little pangs. On 9/11, my dad was an editor for a tech magazine. He was testing a new digital camera for a review that morning. Sometime in the eight o’clock hour, he crossed Sixth Avenue and got a straightaway view of the Twin Towers, unspoiled. He aimed the camera—and the battery died. My dad headed to the office, figuring he’d get the shot later. I think about this whenever I cross Sixth and look downtown.

I’ll readily admit that I know more about 9/11 than I probably should (I’m able to blend into polite company, I swear). Yet I’ve absorbed more than just macabre trivia and the outlines of phantom buildings. There is a lot of (understandable) cynicism about September 11, especially because of what’s come since. But there are genuinely inspiring stories that I also reflect on.

I often revisit The New Yorker’s 2002 profile of Rick Rescorla, the security chief at Morgan Stanley, who saved hundreds. He directed workers out of the South Tower before the second plane hit, defying messages broadcast over the public address system telling people to stay put. Rescorla died when the building collapsed. His story feels like it belongs to a sentimental before.

Last week, I was on a United Airlines flight from Newark to San Francisco. Ours was a Boeing 757: the same airline, the same route, and the same aircraft as United 93. I thought about the passengers on that plane who stormed the cockpit and thwarted the hijackers. All died when United 93 slammed into a field in western Pennsylvania. Many more lived because the terrorists did not reach their target.

Bin Laden’s 2002 manifesto went viral on TikTok a few years ago, reaching millions. Per one user’s endorsement, “Everyone should read it.” The al Qaeda arch-terrorist cut a romantic figure for some Zoomers. Every American should know about the lives he destroyed.

Every American should also read Susan Sontag’s appeal from September 16: “Let’s by all means grieve together. But let’s not be stupid together.”

Sontag was pilloried at the time. Her caution was vindicated in a lot of being stupid together: the Patriot Act and the curbing of civil liberties, the Iraq War, the mainstreaming of Islamophobia, the national securitization of immigration, and all of the other waypoints on the road to where we are now. It’s not too late to heed her wisdom.

I think about normalcy too. My elementary school had a subscription to Time For Kids, the children’s edition of Time Magazine. I remember one issue where I first saw the computer-generated renderings of what was then called the Freedom Tower, a jagged, crystalline structure that would erupt from Ground Zero and rise to 1,776 feet. Erecting such a thing would have been a mistake—with such Orwellian branding, doubly so—locking Lower Manhattan into a permanent state of post-9/11ness. In the end, the name changed, and the design did too: One World Trade Center, a mundane name for a mundane building, fitting for the site, an invitation to recapture a little bit of the mundane that was lost.

I’m in my thirties now, as my parents were on 9/11. Occasionally, I wish that I could replace my persistent, drawn-out disbelief. I don’t expect, nor really want, to revert to the cloistered worldview of a first grader who could not imagine anything worse than the family dog expiring. Still, I would like some normal, or what I imagine was normal, and it will take more than a building to get that back. You’ll often hear people opine about the spirit of September 12, but I’m searching for September 10.

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