I’ve been writing in circles, trying to express something but ending up wandering from memory to memory, thought to thought, struggling to find a throughline. Even though twenty-two years have passed, perhaps it’s simply too soon to clearly find meaning, to understand what happened and why, and way too soon to find a pot of gold at rainbow’s end to inform future generations. I’m talking about the 9/11 attacks on the United States in 2001.
Sometimes when I am stuck, I remember who I am writing for. Yes, of course it’s for you who are reading this now, but the future calls me as well. When I first felt the pull to share my writing, I was often asked who I was writing for. Over time, as I explored the question, the image that came is of a young woman sitting under a tree in the future. She is on the other side of this evolutionary bottleneck we are currently navigating. She needs to hear from us, and from me. Somehow that matters very much. This time, I don’t have a neat story to wrap up and send to her, nor to share with you. The best I can do then is write an interim report.
Twenty-two years ago, on a clear-skied American Tuesday, the American way of life and the identities of all Americans were changed suddenly. Highjacked jetliners were purposely crashed into the two towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, into the seat of the American military - the Pentagon - in Washington D.C. A fourth plane intended for the Capitol was crashed into a field in Pennsylvania by passengers who became aware of what was happening and wrested control of the plane. Thousands of people died in the immediate attacks and thousands more from the aftermath…injuries, trauma, and exposure to toxins in the rubble. Millions around the world watched events unfold in real time on television and received regular still-image updates on computers, while untold thousands of people directly experienced the attacks. Their lives were forever changed in painful, shattering ways from lost loved ones, the terror of surviving, the horror of waiting for news of those missing. Those witnessing from afar were also changed forever, in ways fraught with contradictions. How could we help? Give us something to do! Was it ok to feel grief-filled when we didn’t personally know anyone there?
In time, thousands of US military men and women volunteered to serve our country to defend her from whatever this horrible threat was. And thousands died in the two wars the US launched in response to the attacks, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq. At least 750,000 civilians – regular people trying to live their lives - died in those wars. Millions of people in the US, Afghanistan, and Iraq were wounded, lost loved ones, and bear the scars visible and invisible from what they experienced, from what and who they lost. People acted with great heroism, with discipline, and selflessness; people committed horrible and shameful acts. Everyone who survived experienced things they will never forget, hard as they might try.
Millions of people like me lived far away and didn’t lose anyone in the attacks or experience the agonizing wait for news of whether loved ones survived. We were the ones watching in horror on TV as this unbelievable thing happened minute by minute, hour by hour. We all have our stories of that day. Mine begins as I looked over my brother’s shoulder at his computer at the unbelievable image of the second plane hitting the World Trade Center . We had both just arrived at work.
No one knew what was happening, who was attacking, and what might happen next. In those early hours, time slowed; a palpable longing for unity hovered as all focused on this singular event. Even the Kremlin hung an American flag at half-mast in honor of the victims. Musicians held telethons to raise money. People drove across the country to New York to help look for victims in the rubble until they were asked to stop, to stay home.
Fear was palpable. All flights were grounded for two days as the government tried to sort out whether there were more attackers. The skies were weirdly free of airplane sounds and contrails. Tall buildings remained evacuated. Anthrax was mysteriously sent in envelopes through the mail resulting in several people’s deaths. What the heck was going on? In that moment, we might have come together and done something new, something different. We looked to our leaders for guidance.
They told us to go shopping.
I was insulted and outraged at the time. Go shopping?! We were ready to give, to volunteer, to sacrifice for a greater cause - not buy stuff!
In hindsight, I’m aware the Bush administration was very concerned about economic collapse resulting from people’s responses to the attack. Clearly surprised, I imagine they muddled through the best they could and made decisions based on their policy beliefs and they took advantage of the opportunity to do things they wanted to do. But this backfired terribly. They could have honestly, directly explained the economic concerns to us and likely most would have responded to avoid economic blow back. We weren’t quite as cynical and anti-government then, or at least not as many of us were. Instead, they repeated the mistake of administrations throughout modern history. They believed ordinary people were stupid, weak, and would panic even though history proves this wrong. Since they didn’t trust the people, they squandered an important opportunity to be trustworthy leaders, respectful of the people they were elected to serve. Most people, me included, wanted to be of service. Unfortunately, the message we were given was that we Americans were only of value as consumers. We were patriotic if we bought stuff. Like many others, I found this profoundly degrading and dehumanizing.
I think this treatment of the public created deep fractures in our already-present societal and political rifts. Shopping doesn’t feel like service. Thus, individuals were left to try to give meaning to what happened and to figure out what to do in the absence of a calling to something greater than oneself. Polarizations and divisions that were already present amplified and accelerated. When another opportunity to act in a unified way – as the Covid outbreak unfolded – these fractures exploded in the vacuum created by untrustworthy and uncaring leadership. Today government officials are routinely threatened by and afraid of their constituents. Much of the public believes no one in government can ever be counted on for anything good. What a sad consequence. Yet, we need our governments to enact collective action.
Thus, a profound opportunity for human unity was squandered.
When flights resumed, airports were secured by National Guards and US Marshalls as uniformed men carrying assault rifles. At the time, I was glad to see them, even though I have a life-long fear of guns and people carrying them. Soon, Congress passed the misleadingly named Patriot Act that allowed increased government surveillance, increased penalties for acts of terrorism, expanded what was considered terrorism, and allowed interagency communication, laying the foundation for the surveillance we now endure with little recourse. In time, airport security was nationalized; security measures were steadily increased in the ensuing years bringing us today’s full body scanners, intrusive searches, and the intense, intimidating security checkpoints.
Internationally, our government responded by dropping bombs on a country most Americans couldn’t even locate on the map. Names like Al-Qaeda, Osama bin-Laden, the Taliban, suddenly became household words as enemies to fear and hate. They might be coming for us in airplanes, or through our ports, or in tall buildings. Nowhere was safe. Brown and Asian-appearing people and people who identified as Muslim became potential enemies, to be objectified and vilified by some, and feared by most. It was another battle between ‘good and evil’ we were told. We learned about WMDs – weapons of mass destruction – and were told that justified going to war in Iraq, another country most of us new nothing about.
I remember the president and other leaders vowing to ‘bring the perpetrators to justice’. Thus, the meaning of justice was changed. He meant they intended to kill the people who caused 9/ll, that justice meant to kill. Justice as fairness, equality, facts, courts, and trials before peers was sacrificed in a raged-based response to attacks on American soil. Who was truly good and who was evil? And so, many of us experienced moral trauma.
For those of you who weren’t old enough to remember 2001, I’ll take a moment to describe a few things. Streaming was not a thing yet, there was no YouTube, Netflix, Discord, Facebook, or other social media. Internet was not fast enough in most places to load a photo, let alone a video. CNN was a cable television channel, that had a website. People used globes or paper maps to navigate because there were no map apps. Google had just launched as a search engine; only the military had GPS. People had flip phones for phone calls only; texting was in the future. Most people only had land line phones. Politicians did not mention things like abortion, same-sex marriage, or trans-rights if they wanted to be elected. Few believed climate change mattered. Bigotry, antisemitism, misogyny, homophobia were generally accepted but expressed in more coded ways than today...at least in public life. An affair, an undocumented baby-sitter, or a tax problem could end a political career. And most people in the public eye and positions of power remained white and male, although that was beginning to change.
My relatively new computer, with an astounding 2 Gigabytes of hard drive, crashed regularly when PowerPoint presentations got too big. I travelled with a laptop, mostly so I could do work in MS Office and check email once I got to a hotel… if I had the right cable and could access the hotel’s hard-wired connection. Wi-Fi was just emerging. Most people didn’t have reliable internet or cellular service. Thus, most of our information came from newspapers (paper ones), television, and email. Internet was emerging as a new information source but was not universally used or available. Airplanes had just installed inflight phones in the back of seats where now we see the interactive screens. One could place a call in-flight by swiping a credit card. With these phones, passengers on board the planes that crashed on 9/11 were able to call 911 and their families as the attacks unfolded.
This was the landscape of emerging, but still primitive technology, in which people responded the best they could to 9/11 and its aftermath.
Attempting to make some sense of my own heartache, this week I found myself rewatching footage of the news coverage I would have watched on that day in 2001. I wanted to be reminded of what we knew, what we didn’t know and to remember how things unfolded from voices of the time, before we knew what happened next. The shock of an attack on the homeland, the fear that there was more to come - anytime, anywhere - plus the concurrent weirdness of Anthrax in the mail sickening and killing people was profoundly frightening and disorienting. My family and I found comfort in watching ABC network anchor Peter Jennings as he and other journalists reported nonstop for what seemed like days1.
Personally, my strongest memories are that I wanted my family close; we would go through whatever this was together. Simply being alive was a precious gift. I was also ashamed about how little I knew about our government and international affairs. I vowed to change that. We bought additional small televisions so we could keep up on the news in the kitchen and bedroom – something now replaced by computers and smartphones - and we followed developments closely. This led me to pay much closer attention to national and international affairs, and in time, to learn more about our history, sparking my continuing inquiry of how I fit in and am affected by all of these.
I also listened, this week, to people’s first-hand accounts and remembrances (now easily available on YouTube) of what they experienced. Heroism, resilience, awe, faith, the determination to survive, and rebuild lives are potent and important themes. But the overarching theme in the aftermath remains profound trauma, sadness, and grief.
Right after the attacks, people talked about feeling shame. What had we done, what had our country done that caused people to hate us so? Quickly, that brief window of potential reckoning with our country’s shame was slammed shut in the rage and fervor for vengeance that erupted. And so, our military fought and bombed and were killed and injured for twenty years in our name. Billions of dollars were made by corporate interests on military contracts, securing oil fields, and related projects. Finally, the US withdrew the last of our troops from Afghanistan August 30, 2021. The US combat mission in Iraq formally ended in December 2021, although some soldiers remain stationed there in advisory roles.
What have we done? What have we wrought? The discord between pride in our survival and the confusion and shame at what we did to secure ‘our interests’ remains, unreconciled.
As our country became mired in these wars, shameful actions were done that violated our stated values. Our identities as Americans were cracked open from the shock and dissonance. Who are we? What does it mean to be American? In this shattering, our unhealed and hidden wounds burst open. Our unhealed shame and grief from the violence of the origins of our country - from the genocide of the Native Americans, of slavery, of the Civil War, of the Jim Crow era, of the oppression of women, the internment of Japanese Americans, the many wrongs done to so many people throughout our short history – could no longer remain effectively repressed. The historic trauma and perpetrations of trauma that we all carry festered within us; these untreated, unacknowledged wounds, now demand our attention.
We seem to be mired in the painful part of healing, in the I-don’t-want-to-deal-with-it stage. To avoid the pain, we may collectively just continue to do more of the same - more selfishness and greed, more killing and taking, more blaming and fearing others – and miss an opportunity to reconcile the idealized story of American potential with the reality of our history. To reconcile, to activate our potential, I think we must be willing to face and feel our pain, to honor what was lost and admit what was done. Neglected wounds just get nastier and nastier until they either kill us or they are cared for, treated, and begin to heal. By tending our wounds, we can create a better country and be better people. We’re struggling with this in a big way, mired in the painful middle.
As I started writing this, I thought that twenty-two years is a lot of time. Surely, we can make some sense of what happened, and find some good, some wisdom to celebrate. Maybe if we retell our stories - as we do every anniversary - as we recognize our grief and sadness, surely, we’ll figure something out. But we don’t seem to resolve anything. This year, the remembering barely makes the news.
So, I found myself writing in circles, as if in murky water with junk and boulders in the churn. There is much to grieve. There is much to admit, face, and integrate. Can we who have experienced these times process them, or is that for future historians? Maybe we’re still too close to the events to see their effects with any clarity.
Perhaps, people like me, who were distant witnesses have a role to play in collective processing. We have the personal trauma and guilt of being ‘unaffected’ bystanders. But the sadness and grief are bigger than our personal stories. It’s a grief of innocence lost, of what could have been, of the lost potential of all those wounded, traumatized, and killed, of a better country that could have emerged. Forgetting is a convenience and a lie. Perhaps as we allow ourselves to feel the murkiness, the unattached collective grief, we then honor it with our care. Perhaps if I give this grief, wounding, and collective trauma even a bit of my care and attention, well, perhaps some good comes of that. The millions who were directly affected by 9/11 and the wars fought in its name carry heavy burdens and have given enough. Perhaps, by caring, offering my attention, by remembering and honoring I can ease or defuse that burden in some small way.
I want to write a happy ending. I want to tell you how you can feel empowered and have a three-point positive take away from this ongoing story. But I’m still in the middle of this story, we’re still in the middle of the story. We’re in the part where the hero hasn’t yet done the heroic thing that makes everything come out right...or we don’t yet recognize it.
Throughout these past twenty-two years, I believe most people have done the best they could, making decisions and acting in each moment. Many of those decisions are now clearly wrong and should not be repeated or condoned. But they happened within the complex systems of the time. Systems can be perturbed, by love and kindness, by careful examination, by exposure of structures that harm us. Of course violence and hatred perturb systems profoundly. Perturbed systems change. Aware of this, we can influence them, perturb them, for good.
And so, I write in circles, knowing that circles always become spirals that lead to something different. I know healing is possible. I know we humans can be brave, and caring, and loving. I know we are happiest when we are helping one another.
I will carry on doing the best I can, open to new understandings and possibilities. I trust that you will, too. I take heart that somewhere in the distant future, a young woman sits under a leafy tree ready to read this interim report. I hope to be able to send a better, more complete, and more cheerful report in years to come.
Thank you for this thoughtful article about a pivotal moment in US history. Much of what we now experience can be directly ascribed to that day and the decisions made in its name. Our country, in which the people once believed in freedom, is now embracing full surveillance and censorship in the name of combating “disinformation” and promoting national security.
I’d want the woman in the future to be understand clear,ly that, despite the contemporaneous allegations to the contrary, neither the government of Afghanistan nor Iraq were responsible for what happened that day. And the country that is supposed to have had nineteen nationals involved? Well, they were from a different country, one whose “important” nationals were quickly flown out of the US by the military. That country has remained a close ally.
I hope that the future woman will be shocked, because it no longer happens, to learn that our government would lie to us, their own people. That they would kill millions of innocent people for the economic benefit of the infamous Military Industrial Complex, and in the projection of power, of not looking week.
Should we, living now, be surprised that some people have concluded that everything the government says is a lie?
As for me, I was in Toronto at the time. We didn’t know about it till my hostess received a phone call from her husband in Shanghai to put the TV on. It was profoundly disorienting to watch. We couldn’t tell live coverage from repeats. The scenes were horrifying.
I was supposed to go somewhere that afternoon. As it was an American company, I called to see if it had been cancelled . It hadn’t.
I spent the afternoon on a movie set. Of course, planes were grounded and I couldn’t leave on my planned departure date.
Of all the unresolved enigmas that have happened during my life of almost eighty years, the debacle of 9/11 is the most perplexing and disturbingly unresolved. I always say that if i could ask the Divine, (the Main Frame whatever you call the omniscient overview) one question upon leaving this plane of existence, it would be 'WHO WAS IT THAT ACTUALLY PERPETRATED 9/11? And was it an "inside job"? There was so much evidence that was quickly hidden from public view, that there is actually no earthly way of finding that answer. I guess I will have to wait until such a divine overview shows up to find out the end of THAT story. But what bothers me is why does this seemingly unanswerable question, bother me to the degree that that would be the one question I would ask? I could write it off to the fact that I am a Libra and justice and fairness just come with the territory.. But that is a shallow answer. I think it is that something just smelled SO OFF .. i absolutely intuitively KNEW that we were being lied to by our government and that they somehow were INVOLVED in what happened. I always hoped that someone would come out with concrete proof corroborating that knowing , but as Cynthia said, there was never any conclusive answer. There may never be one. Or perhaps as she said, maybe it is only from enough of a distance from the event that someone will accurately piece the truth together.. Either way, it is VERY disquieting to me to this day. And I thank you Cynthia for your depth research as usual, pointing out some of the most salient features of this unsolved mystery. ariel spilsbury