Millennials Won't Shut Up About 9/11

More than once, my Gen-Z students and colleagues have pointed out that Millennials (me, hello) are obsessed with 9/11. And I get it. If you’re too young to remember or it happened before your time, it’s perfectly understandable. So much has happened since: the Iraq war, the 2008 housing crisis, the Boston bombing, COVID, Black Lives Matter protests. So why fixate on the events of a single day, 25 years ago? You know what happened, but you might not know what changed. 

To tell you about that story, I have to tell you this one first. I turned 36 not long ago. That puts my birth in the summer of 1990. The Berlin Wall fell the year before, and the Soviet Union with it. For almost fifty years, the world had been living under the threat of nuclear annihilation. Even before, since the summer of 1914, the world was at war more often than not. When the Cold War ended, that dark mushroom cloud hanging over all of our heads finally dissipated. The ensuing Gulf War was so brief in comparison, it seemed that American wars were now brief, winnable affairs. This means that for the United States, the 90s began on a high note. Remember that, it’s important.

America established its supremacy, and a 75-year battle between democracy and totalitarianism ended with liberty and justice for all. That was the narrative. The reality is more complicated. For the first time since the postwar 1950s, the US entered an age of prosperity and knew it. We were on top, and we rubbed the world’s face in it. But prosperity ballooned into overabundance, which stimulated overindulgence. Enormous malls, consumer oases in suburban deserts, flourished as the country obsessed over cults, kidnappers, murderers and serial killers. My sister taped up lots of Marylin Manson posters. Music was getting, as my mom put it, “dark.” 

The 90s weren’t all sunshine and scrunchies. Terrorism was already real. Ramzi Yousef bombed the World Trade Center basement in 1993, aiming to collapse the Twin Towers. Two years later, Timothy McVeigh blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. My family and I lived two hours north off Interstate 35, and McVeigh was heading our way. My school promptly locked down. 168 people were killed, including 19 kids in the building’s daycare center. The word they used on the news was “fringe.” Fringe extremists, acting of their own freakish accord. What happened September 11th was a sophisticated, coordinated attack years in the making, the kind Hollywood teased for ages. 

9/11 happened on a Tuesday. I say this because I didn’t know Pearl Harbor was ambushed on a Sunday, or that Hiroshima was bombed on a Monday. I won’t describe my own experience with 9/11 in this piece (I did that here). What matters from this point on are the minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years that followed. 

The general consensus was that this was just the start. Officially, no one knew who perpetrated the attacks. Rumors were already swirling, as if their ingredients always permeated the air and only coalesced once destruction began. My fifth-grade classmate Aaron and my stepdad, John, both told me that nukes were gonna fly. Until then, it seemed other major American cities would suffer similar attacks, and soon. Within days, even. And nobody knew who was “next.” 

Then, one week after 9/11, US senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy were contaminated and sickened by anthrax powder. Seventeen people became infected with the deadly bacterial agent, and five died. In November, another passenger plane crashed in New York City, in the borough of Queens. Logically, everyone jumped to ‘terrorism’ as the likely cause, but the crash turned out to be a tragic accident. But, in December, Richard Reid tried bombing a passenger plane mid-flight using explosives he’d packed in his shoes. That’s why, for years after, you had to take your shoes off for TSA. Something horrible seemed to happen every damn month—sound familiar?

In March 2002, Homeland Security Presidential Directive published their color-coded Homeland Security Advisory System, or “terror alert level.” Literally, a cold-to-hot gradient used to forecast terrorist attacks like weather. Bright and sunny with a chance of sarin fog. The US government granted itself permission to spy on American citizens through the Patriot Act of 2001. All in the name of fighting terror, of course. Per the ACLU, “The law amounted to an overnight revision of the nation's surveillance laws that vastly expanded the government's authority to spy on its own citizens, while simultaneously reducing checks and balances on those powers.” 

9/11 catalyzed the surveillance state we’re living in now. Our privacy is the cost of the paranoia embodied by the Patriot Act, embedded in the American psyche. Regardless of where you lived or how old you were, plans for the rest of your life just went up in smoke. Meanwhile, the United States was preparing to retaliate against not just countries, but an entire cultural region. Rising Islamophobia made victims out of people who barely resembled the hijackers whose faces we saw daily in the news. Grief and rage fed by slander and misinformation allowed a war in Iraq to erupt in 2003. Even though Iraq had no involvement with 9/11, being brown, Muslim, and Middle Eastern satisfied cries for a sacrifice. 

9/11 sent a wave of psychological trauma through every American mind, as if their own houses had been invaded. Every man aged eighteen to thirty-five was certain he would be drafted in the war against whoever attacked us. It felt borderline illegal to laugh, and no one knew when it was okay to smile again. Nuclear war, which the 90s had seemingly vanquished, was once again an unnervingly real possibility. Working at a highrise anywhere in the States suddenly carried an air of what-if? The high note that apparently the whole world was singing while I was born, abruptly and violently stopped. 

Since then, it’s been mostly screaming. And that is your song.