I don’t remember 9/11.
I was six — a first-grader — that September, and I have no memories of it. No memory of hearing about the first plane, no memory of watching the second plane, no memory of my parents or teacher telling me what happened and trying to explain why it had.
I know about 9/11, of course. I’ve read several books about the events immediately before, during, and after, and read hundreds more informed by 9/11, a cultural memory so potent and searing that it lurks in the background of almost every American novel written after the fact, present in the back of every character’s mind even if it goes unspoken. I have watched those videos of the planes disappearing into the towers more times than I care to count.
But I don’t remember ever feeling 9/11.
I couldn’t tell you where I was when someone told me about it. I can’t tell you if they told me in passing or sat me down to explain more fully. I don’t remember. I don’t remember shock, or terror, or sadness, or anger, or watching the country collect itself and begin to heal afterwards.
I don’t remember being traumatized by it.
But I remember it being there.
I remember it being there, always.
I don’t remember flying without the TSA. It is difficult for me to imagine flying without intensive airport security, and in fact I doubt I would feel safe if I did. I don’t remember a time before “See Something, Say Something.” My first memories of flights to visit family in Georgia are populated as much by the novelty of leaving the ground as scrutinizing other passengers and wondering what on Earth constituted “suspicious.”
It never occurred to me that shopping could be a patriotic act rather than just a pastime or a matter of necessity. All I knew was that it was something everyone did. A lot. And that I liked it if it meant I got lots of books I didn’t have to share with my brother.
When Edward Snowden revealed the extent of the NSA’s surveillance of American citizens, I thought it was a terrible thing, but it never shocked me. I don’t think it ever really even surprised me. Of course they were watching. Everyone was always watching.
I do remember the Iraq War. I remember seeing on the news that it was supposed to be over by the end of 2003, and I remember always being surprised when I found out it wasn’t over yet. It never made sense to me then why we went there, let alone what war entailed, but those were mysteries of the adult world less pressing than figuring out how Nancy Drew managed to be so aggressively competent and why I couldn’t have a trampoline.
When I watch the footage of the planes crashing into the towers now, it feels like something I have seen a million times, numbness winning out over horror or fury or grief. The reactions get me more than the footage — the sounds of people confronted with the unimaginable, feeling 9/11 as it happened.
Even at a young age I envied their naiveté. Of course a plane could fly into those towers. I had seen it happen on screens a million times. Today, when a plane passes overhead, I look up to see how low it is flying. This seems as obvious to me as looking both ways when I cross the street, a childhood instinct you can never quite shake and that perhaps it is in your best interest not to.
This is all to say that I feel as if 9/11 is, at least to me, a MacGuffin. An empty signifier. A vacuous event that nonetheless motivates the rest of the plot, the first scene in a movie some future civilization makes about the United States’s twenty-first century.
I never felt what it was to have one’s worldview so utterly and tragically dismantled in the course of a single day, but I know what it was to grow up absorbing the reactions to this dismantling (the wars, the detainees, the drones) as a matter of course, sheltered as much from the details of such deeds as to the opposition of many Americans to them.
I never felt 9/11, but I know it better than most.
I know it because I have never known anything else.
It remains the context upon which my life and understanding of the world is built, a consequence of upbringing beyond the touch of parents, extended family, or teachers; my understanding of the world is informed by the cultural, political, and social malaise that surrounds 9/11, a life spent inhaling the dust of a pair of towers I didn’t watch fall.
Why I’m writing this now is to let you know, reader, that I come from a generation of first-time voters that has few memories of a time before it was common practice for the United States government to collect data on all of its citizens, on all the world. I come from a generation that grew up in the aftershocks of 9/11, and I’ve come to tell you that as much as I personally am against the foreign and domestic policy our government has used terrorism to justify, it’s all I’ve ever really known.
I can protest and write against these policies, but none of them will ever surprise me. No measure of invasive privacy violations, of wars built on fabricated justifications, of torture will ever surprise me. I can condemn it, I can hate it, but I will never be naive enough to be so earnestly shocked and appalled by it as those people on the tapes, watching the towers fall. Our cultural memory does not allow us to ever get back to that place again. The numbness is all, and so the security state advances.
In looking to the future, even beyond a Trump presidency, I see an endless tide of civil liberties violations committed against citizens and non-citizens alike by our government, and I also see the unacknowledged danger that my generation and the ones after us pose. We will all have grown up in a security state.
This post-2001 normal is not normal.
But our time to get back to actual normality, to a society without such massive infrastructure dedicated to surveillance and war, is running out.
It’s running out because I couldn’t tell you what it’s like to live before the towers fell. I would never be able to tell you if we made it back to that normality, and the generations after me won’t be able to either.
I’m not sure we could ever get back to that old normality, even if we tried, but I’d like to try. I’d like to know what it’s like to live without having to tape over my webcam or anticipate the NSA reading my text messages. I’d like to be able to say that the United States does not torture.
But unless we do something now, that old normality that is so foreign to me will slip away from us for good, and this existence, this cynical understanding of our own government’s policies that strive to ease us into a security state, will become permanent, the one thing we will never be able to forget because we will never outlive it.
