A Quarter of a Century Later

I was five years old, sitting on a dark green shag carpet in my home in Winnipeg, witnessing the television the way everyone else was. My mother was pregnant with my little brother, and she wondered how she could bring another life into a world where something like this could happen.

I was born in the middle of the 1990s, in the middle of the 'peaceful' decade, wedged between the Cold War and the War on Terror. The rise of the early internet made people believe in a connected, peaceful world with open borders and shared knowledge. The United States was understood to be the last remaining global superpower, and citizens felt safe from foreign threats.

It took only a handful of men with a plan to irreversibly change that.

A sobriety washed over the world, the taste of ash and dust. And we are now distant enough that an entire generation of millions only knows about what happened from archival footage (often age-gated) and textbooks.

While there is one generation who only understands the day as history in textbooks, there are several others who were lucid and present. I was only a few years away from those who remember teachers rolling in a television so they could watch the carnage live as the world fell apart. A horror unifying the previously sheltered children and adolescents of such a superpower.

And there are many who do not understand why this is still talked about, especially when so many other tragedies are not. It's a fair question, as over a million have died in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan between 2001 and 2023 as a result. As a response.

For what came afterwards? Fear and paranoia and grief cultivated into a national unity. Flags displayed in record numbers, political differences set aside, approval ratings for the federal government and political leadership reaching levels unseen in decades. The birth of the digital media era.

The culture spawned is what really gets me.

You have Robert Pattinson's performance in Remember Me (2010), the ending of Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation. You have the fourteenth studio album by Cat System Corp, News at 11. You have Loose Change and Michael Moore's documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11. The podcast about the day after. The hoax of lost media in "LOL SUPERMAN". The thousand tasteless jokes. The woman who wasn't there. The disappearance of Dr. Sneha Anne Philip. The comedian Jon Stewart desperately trying to push the James Zadroga Act through Congress and save lives. I'm sure I don't need to tell you that My Chemical Romance exists because of it, or how Seth MacFarlane overslept and avoided being a passenger.

We try to connect the dots and understand in retrospect, and in truth, this is how I understand what happened. Through the echoes and reverberations caught in media. I was too young to have the memory of the live recordings of buildings imprinted in my mind as it happened. But I can remember my mom, the awful green shag carpet, and how excited I was to have a little brother born seven months later.

There are hours-long dashboards on YouTube going through the morning. A masterful compilation of various television stations, news tickers, flight logs, with facts and figures all presented as-it-happened, from 7:46AM to noon. I return to this often, replaying the events, trying to pinpoint exactly when it was understood that the accidental was really intentional. Trying to find the specific moment it was understood the entire world had changed.

Is this what it means to remember—to hoard cultural aftershocks like a magpie?

It's been a quarter of a century. I have nothing new to share with you, only a mimicry of what's been said countless times before, spun around different threads of ideology. What else do we have left now but rumination? To pick the still-sore scar never fully healed. To orbit the Xerox'd questions and grief and loss. There is still sense left on the table, still a dozen ways to pattern-recognize. It's only human.

I do not want to forget. I do not want to forget the consequences of cruelty. I do not want to forget Gander, Newfoundland taking in 6,000 people on 30 flights. I do not want to forget the Red bandanna man Welles Crowther. I do not want to forget the voicemail of Brian Sweeney from Flight 175. I do not want to forget Rick Rescorla singing hymns down the stairwell megaphone. I do not want to forget the impossible selflessness of the people who climbed 110 flights of stairs while wearing 90 pounds of FDNY gear just to try to save one more straggler, just one more human being. I do not want to forget the undue violence in the response that came after. I do not want to forget. Please don't let me forget.