I was five years old when 9/11 happened, but I still had a childhood.
That fateful day houses some of my very first memories from my time in this world. It was the first time I saw adults confused and scared. My mom drank her morning coffee as she sat in her beige-blue recliner and tears welled in her eyes. Her pupils darted from side to side. But they never strayed far from the billows of smoke that rose from the North Tower of the World Trade Center on that momentous morning when paradigms first began to shift.
She wrestled alone with the idea of driving her only son into preschool that day, unsure whether or not her country was under attack. The stagnant smell of her morning brew hovered in the air and struck a bitter chord.
In school that day, the teachers were equally unsure how to behave. They didn’t have the foggiest idea of how to protect us from the reality unfolding. They struggled to keep the knowledge to themselves.
In the aftermath of America’s most recent school massacre, Apalachee High School teacher Jennifer Carter told the harrowing tale of how she had to deceive her students about the danger that they were all in as a mass shooter entered their building.
“I lied. I lied to my kids today in second period. I told them it was just a drill. I told them to get behind my couches (thank GOD I ditched desks and have bulky furniture!) and be quiet — the more quiet we are the faster the drill will end. I knew it was a lie… My kids were able to just hide and not panic for over 10 minutes, until we heard the banging on doors, walkie talkies, and yelling in the hallway. Then I had to come clean. My kids — and that’s what they are. Not just students. They are MY KIDS- were so brave. They still trusted me and did exactly what I asked… It was the worst 20 minutes of my career… My planning paid off. Planning I wish I had never had to actually execute,” said Carter in a Facebook post, according to “The Daily Caller.”
I can’t know what exactly it was for the adults within my nation to wrestle with the events that took place on 9/11. But I recall our preschool employees grappling with a comparable fear as that Apalachee High School teacher. I recall them dealing with a situation that all of their years of training could never properly prepare them for. They lacked the words to tell us that our country was under attack. But nor did they have the resolve to keep such a seismic event entirely to themselves. The paranoia within the room was palpable and time stood frozen.
Our teachers were focused on that same replaying reel that my mother had been so soberly captivated by. They stared at it, shell-shocked, teary-eyed, and muttering quietly amongst themselves. Some of them hugged one another.
And I wondered why.
The only recollections I had of the news and current events were of the horrible, negative variety. Each time I was in a room with those news anchors on the TV screen, it was rare for them to have anything positive to report. Mounting chaos in the Middle East, explosions, and terrorist attacks weren’t unusual. That sort of chaos had begun to feel humdrum to a five-year-old me. It was the rule rather than the exception. Current events almost invariably centered around a world that appeared to be falling apart at the seams.
The fatalistic back and forth of news anchors was an inseparable feature of the talking head chatter that adults always seemed to enjoy for some weird reason. I couldn’t bring myself to understand on that fateful day how this banal pastime of theirs could be upsetting them more than The Lion King had upset me.
When I see my little cousin, his smile gleams — through masks and wildfire smoke and riots and insurrections. He watches Bluey as the climate changes. He plays with dinosaurs as we worry about AI uprisings. He pulls sticks from the ground and gets lost in wild meanderings of his imagination. He jumps in piles of leaves and makes up games and is ruled by an internal realm of impulse and whimsy.
His free-flowing creativity feels like it belongs to a far less dire world. And yet, he walks the earth with the gleeful stomps of a giant. He clambers clumsily over sidewalks and holds my hand as we cross the street. He asks if we can go to the park as a fraught present drifts through my mind.
He’s oblivious to the intrepid times he’s gallivanting through. He’s blissfully unaware of all of these threats we’re facing. And in his contagious laughter, I see fleeting reflections of life’s joyous sides. I see that perseverance is possible.
But each time some new calamitous current event takes place, it sends reality hurdling reliably back into frame. This unmoored youth of his is only a flicker. And flickers fade.
He’ll grow up. Ecstatic smiles will fade with the passing seasons. I resent the things he’ll have to see, the new normals he’ll have to accept.
I want to protect him from them. I want to hold out my arms and shield him from any of the futures that might force him to look back longingly on these strange days of domestic decay. I hope that he can transcend all of this turmoil that we’ve left for him to clean. It’s a lofty vision.
When he thinks back on these earliest years, I wonder — what will he remember? Will he reflect wistfully back on these dystopian days in the same way I think about the morning cartoons, MP3 players, and the bygone candies of my youth?
Will the thought of masks and TikToks and backpacks with bullet shields trigger the warm, fuzzy feelings of nostalgia that those shelved video cassettes of my childhood still do for me?
Will he look back at all of this confusion and remember only the calm?
Will he fall into the illusion of thinking that we terrified adults actually have some hold on the ground beneath our feet?
I don’t remember much of what happened immediately after 9/11. I don’t remember the confusion or the feelings of unity that followed. I don’t remember the ground shifting at a break-neck pace beneath me. But by the next time I walked into an airport, it surely had. I didn’t understand that yet though.
My world was jungle gyms and kickball games, Nintendo 64 and tree-climbing, Game Boy games and caterpillar hunts. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were abstract concepts that could never distract me from my enthralling land of make-believe.
I was privileged. But I was also a child. Disease and starvation and insanity and addiction and grief were things that I was aware of, but only loosely. They could slip my mind unnoticed for entire weeks at a time.
It’s easy to miss the future being pulled from our fingertips when the payments happen in installments. It’s hard to recognize those moments when we barter away our tomorrows. Suns rise on new days regardless of what we do to stop them. There’s no halting the frenetic madness of life on planet earth.
At 28 years old, it’s hard to believe how much I’ve already witnessed. It’s hard to grasp the sheer number of changes I’ve watched our world incur. And I ask myself the familiar question of, “Where did all of the time go?”
Where was I when the wars started? Was I swinging on the jungle gym or playing Simon Says when the troops were deployed?
Where was I when the entirety of human knowledge entered our pockets? Was I catching fireflies or jumping on a trampoline when the stock market collapsed?
Somewhere stretched in between silly band bracelets, or lost in old cartoons, or concealed within the distant echoes of ice-cream truck jingles, our futures drifted quietly away from us.
Is it actually possible that children today can see the beauty beyond all of this chaos we’ve left them? It’s hard for me to imagine, but then, I’m not nearly as good an imaginer as I once was.
What a great article, Ben. I lived through all of it, and was even watching TV in my office when the second plane hit the other tower. That's when everyone realized it wasn't an aviation accident, but a terror attack. The next few hours were a blur. I remember the video of people jumping from the WTC to their certain death. They did so to avoid the fires. Patriotism was at an all time high, and people applauded the first attacks on Kabul. I applauded, and, like millions of Americans, wanted those 'rag heads' dead. You are lucky you were just a wee lad when this horror was perpetrated upon our nation.
To put 9/11 in a bit of perspective for you: In 1993, we lived through the first bombing of the World Trade Center. Not nearly as devastating, but still. That was followed by the bombing in Oklahoma City (domestic terrorism). Interspersed with Ruby Ridge (1992) and David Koresh (1993).
In other words, 9/11 followed a decade of intense violence. It felt like our world was falling apart.
For those of us in Generation Jones - the sandwich generation between Boomers and X - we’d also come of age during the awful violence of the 1960s and early 1970s. What’s nostalgically seen as the Age of Aquarius with love and peace and Woodstock, was in reality a decade and a half of constant violence. Kent State… Yes 100% yes, there was good cause for much of the violence. Civil rights movement probably wouldn’t have succeeded without violence, sad to say. And the war in Vietnam wouldn’t have ended with simply peaceful protests. But when you’re 15, it’s scary as hell. A lot of us didn’t think the US would survive. In the 1970s. When I’m guessing your parents were born.
Every single generation, yours, mine, my grandparents’, has its own unique set of memories to contend with. Good and bad.
I get upset beyond measure with Gen-Jones remembering just the love and peace and funky shirts and Woodstock, and forgetting everything else.
Every generation has its unique memory set. We tend to choose to hold onto the impossibly good. Only the defining and national bad moments are seared into our brains. JFK’s assassination. Kent State. Jonestown. Watergate. And 9/11.