Why Are We Still Talking About 9/11?

How you discuss 9/11 hinges on where and how old you were. It outlines who you were before. The younger you were, the less of a secret it is that this was a long time coming. I am part of the last generation to have a definitive pre-9/11 childhood. We didn’t know just how many atrocities our country had a hand in, whose comeuppance we were about to reap. There was no guarantee we would find out on our own. Gen-Xers were mostly out of college when 9/11 happened. The visionary world they were primed to inherit, the very mirage concealing America’s complicity, crumbled before them on the news. Millennials like myself were in grade and middle schools. That world was still shaping us. When it disappeared in a cloud of smoke and fire, time itself seemed to collapse.

Our upturned reality became the next generation’s normal. Anyone born right before and in the years since grew up in the invisible shadow of the World Trade Center, and everything it stood for. The oldest Gen-Zers get the luxury of working backwards to 9/11, having gained political consciousness during the invasion of Iraq (2003–2011). The rest of us had to live it.

In 2001, everyone had questions. No one had answers. Not yet anyway. How was it that so much could change in less than one day? Why are we still talking about it all these years later?

That’s like asking why we still talk about the Big Bang. To understand how our fixation with September 11 began, you have to know what came to end. This is what it looked like when 9/11 washed over my corner of Missouri on its way around the globe. 

7:30 AM – 8:02 AM CST

My stepfather dropped me off at Liberty Hill Elementary School around 7:30 every morning, Monday–Friday, from 1999 to 2002. The cold, bright morning offered a preview of fall. I remember how chilly it felt, how wet with dew my Wal-Mart shoes were when my friends and I came in off the playground. It’s like the weather had school spirit. The trees would go red any day now. 

I was eating breakfast with the other Latchkey kids when the first plane hit. News was on its way but for the moment, life was all about a square piece of pizza. People were already leaping from the floors above the impact zone as I turned my tray to the dish lady. I ate fast to avoid the crush of students all leaving at once. 

The bell sounded at 8 AM. Adults led us out of the lunchroom and walked us to our classrooms. The cooler ones doled out high fives. Morning announcements began. I said my see-you-laters to friends in different grades. By the time I got settled at my desk, the second plane had struck.

8:03 AM – 8:59 AM CST

Terrorists flew United Airlines 175 into the World Trade Center’s South Tower at 9:03 AM EST. It followed American Airlines Flight 11, which hit the North Tower around 18 minutes earlier. In that timespan, almost every major news outlet and their affiliates had cameras trained on the burning buildings. The disaster unfolding in New York now had an audience around the globe.

In Missouri, what New Yorkers call “flyover territory,” we were one hour removed. Our day began at the end of hundreds of lives on the East Coast. Mrs. Schneider was about to discuss last night’s homework with us, her fifth-graders, when Principal Roe burst through the door. Principal Roe and Mrs. Schneider were two serious-faced peas in a pod. To see either educator abandon their composure told me something was terribly wrong. She turned on the overhead TV and told our teacher to look.

I don’t recall how long we watched the World Trade Center burn. Principal Roe left to tell others. When Mrs. Schneider turned the TV off, we almost rioted. “You shouldn’t see this,” she told us. “Too late now,” we argued. “You’re only making it worse!” She turned it back on as the stoic voice of Peter Jennings announced that the Pentagon had just been hit. 

Suddenly one of the Trade Center buildings fell into a mushroom of smoke. The cloud enveloped the city. I remember the highrises of New York shrouded in sunlit dust with a single twin left smoldering above. The South Tower had collapsed. Thousands of people died and we just sat and watched.

9:00 AM – 9:28 AM CST

Eleven-year-old me was obsessed with earthquakes and volcanoes. It was how I imagined what it must’ve been like on the ground in Manhattan. The trembling earth as over a hundred floors of steel and concrete landed in the streets, the heat of the blaze, all that toxic smoke. An ash cloud billowed over New York City and it looked like a pyroclastic flow. 

After the collapse, Mrs. Schneider turned the TV off for good and called her husband, a soldier stationed at nearby Fort Leavenworth. She asked through tears if we were going to war. He said they were on alert, that he had to go now and would call as soon as he could. On the intercom, Principal Roe asked that all teachers turn off their televisions. 

9:29 AM – 11:20 AM CST

We didn’t know the North Tower collapsed until lunchtime. It fell at 10:28 AM EST—9:28 Central Time. My mother worked at the Kansas City Museum in 2001. She watched 9/11 play out from the TV in her break room. They stayed open until the usual 5pm for the handful of families distracting their kids from the attack. My stepdad worked at Job Corps, a government-run detention facility. They went on lockdown soon after the second plane hit. 

When my class sat down to lunch, kids were already sick of hearing about it. Many just wanted to eat in peace. On the other end of the spectrum were kids who wouldn’t shut up. I was closer to that end than I care to admit. I asked if anyone had relatives in New York City. One boy said “Yes” too quickly. I called him a Liar. Lunch concluded after 25 minutes at 11:20 AM CST.

11:21 AM – 4:00 PM CST

Kids started getting called out of class after lunch. Every twenty minutes or so, a nervous parent picked up their child. It would’ve made teaching impossible if it wasn’t already. I waited with envy against the odds that my parents were on their way. 

I recall no further academic endeavours that day. Maybe our counselor came by to ask if we had questions. I can see Mrs. Lee being sweet enough to do that. What stands out is the vacant sky, the stuffy eeriness of indoor recess on a warm, sunny afternoon. Kansas City sits roughly 1,200 miles from Manhattan and they still wouldn’t let us outside. 

The school day ended at 3:15 PM. Half my class had gone by then. Mrs. Lee did end up coming by, not to console but coach us about discussing the disaster around younger students. I went to the afterschool Latchkey group which was also thinly herded. I saw a schoolmate’s Kindergarten sibling in tears and felt slotted into this strange grey area between knowledge and ignorance. At least the coordinators, teenage volunteers from the local high school, took us outdoors. 

My stepfather picked me up at around 4 PM, earlier than usual. I asked if he saw the whole thing. He said it was all they talked about at work. The man had no filter so he didn’t spare the more gruesome aspects of the day. He told me about the jumpers. I tried imagining my body as it went from 150 MPH to 0. Then, when he was supposed to turn right, he went left.

4:01 PM – 6:00 PM CST

My confusion only worsened the further he drove from home. We passed QuikTrips and Shamrocks with lines for the pumps that wrapped around the block. More cars than I’d ever seen at once, all there for gas. It turns out that my stepfather didn’t leave early to get me. He’d left work early because he heard about the rush on the gas stations.

A blizzard of rumors began that day. NYC Port Authority closed bridges and tunnels leading into Manhattan in case of another attack. A car bomb in D.C. allegedly exploded outside the State Department. I remember calls on the radio for an immediate nuclear response. In Kansas City, a rumor was spreading that oil prices in the Middle East were about to skyrocket.

My mother’s husband told me we aren’t taking chances. He was determined to fill his tank to the brim and sit on it. For two hours we idled in line at a gas station I would call the 9/11 QuikTrip. At six o’clock, we’d barely moved one car length and we were getting hungry. “Screw this,” said my stepfather, and he made an illegal u-turn in the middle of the street. His stubbornness dissolved in the time it takes to watch a movie. 

6:01 PM – 7:33 PM CST

My stepfather was the first to tell me I would remember this day as long as I lived. He told me about being in high school when JFK got shot (he was fifteen years older than my mother). It had the same level of detail as stories from my teachers about the Challenger disaster. Peter Jennings put the tragedy on par with the attack on Pearl Harbor. 

My brother and two of his friends were sitting around the TV when we got home. I can still smell the overwhelming musk of too much Calvin Klein. The three sophomores had adopted the hunger for revenge circulating in the air across America. My brother boasted the effects a nuclear bomb would have on the people of Afghanistan. “There’ll be nothing left. Just a glass parking lot.” The TV seemed obsessed with playing the same footage on repeat. The World Trade Center fell so easily, then reappeared for a precious few seconds only to collapse all over.  

On September 11, 2001, the sun set in Kansas City at 7:33 PM CST. Rescue efforts would continue in New York through the night. Soon the collective terror across the United States would yield to the individual horrors experienced by survivors. The coming days would fill with amateur and studio footage, eyewitness accounts of a burning wire odor and feeling the heat of the impacts.

We would hear from a man who saw United Flight 175 barrelling towards him and survived the collision.

A woman struck by the landing gear after it shot through the Tower and detached from the plane.

A man in the North Tower lobby whose sister and niece were on UA 175 as it crashed into the South Tower.

A bisected woman who remained conscious long enough to tell a first responder, “I’m not dead. Call my daughter. I’m not dead.”

Twenty-three years later, why are we still talking about it?

9/11 sealed off the 20th century like the entrance to a tomb. The relative insulation the U.S. enjoyed during the nineties had been violently stripped away. This “attack on America” disrupted the realization of an ideal world. Maybe that was the point. To whose ideal was the world being realized? How were we to go forward following its demise? 

When I was eleven years old, my mother sent me to bed around the time M*A*S*H* came on. War has been our legacy for so long. I remember staring at my ceiling. Something had come home to roost. My head swam with conjecture and irradiated glass. I can’t recall the days prior to 9/11; the amnesiac effects of American mundanity. It was the end of our innocence, and the beginning of our disillusionment. That night, I fell asleep knowing I would wake to a new reality: harsher, paranoid, deeply unforgiving.

Twenty-three years later, I’ve yet to be proven wrong.