25 years ago, Jamie and I were at Las Vegas's famed Luxor hotel - the pyramid with the huge beam of light at night - when we got a call from my brother telling us to turn on the television.
I've shared this story before, I won't repeat it, but after watching the towers fall on TV, we were stranded in Vegas for a few days before we were able to get out.
In the years since, people not yet born, or who were children at the time, have lived in a world where they see their elders taking a thing *very seriously*. This, they find perplexing. Tragedies happen every day. Mass murder, earthquakes... Why this? Why are we fixated on a few thousand people dying and monuments to America's economic dominance collapsing?
Social media leads me to believe that no one ever really sat The Kids down and gave them a good talking to about what happened and why. That's not unreasonable. I don't think many people who were adult Americans when 9/11 occurred ever fully processed what was happening and why. And certainly many, many people folded the tragedy into their agendas in politics, business, international affairs, what-have-you. And that alone has muddled the narrative enough that it takes effort to remember the actual day and what we found out in the aftermath.
The Kids sorting it out now do not have a memory of what the world was like before. To them, airports were always a DMZ. They can't fathom like when all we worried about was nuclear weapons raining down and disappearing in a convenient flash. They don't get the panic that set in after 9/11, as the trauma and our feelings of safety and security as a country became infected and then went septic - leadership and the public alike.
Further, from what I've read, many are not aware of how - in the decade after the towers fell - many of us were playing whack-a-mole with our friends and neighbors as they bubbled up conspiracy theories. That this battle already happened. And with the anniversary, I see plenty of 20-somethings online "just asking questions". Never mind that the questions were answered, repeatedly, by better sources than @digdawgatx512 on twitter X. Legitimate and the best sources we could hope for published reports, official and otherwise.
And, also, no. No one will ever know the full truth, but, my pal, you are not cracking things wide open from your parent's basement in Sheboygan, either. I don't care that you just saw an archived news story no one is talking about. We had hundreds of dead-end leads and probably really did identify unrelated security leaks left and right in the wake of 9/11.
But I cannot stress enough: The tremendous effort made to get to and spread the actual facts of what happened was dismissed out of hand by many people, and those people were delusional enough, or profited enough, by banging the drum that the facts were largely buried. Even though they are still out there, clear as day.
My ask: Can we please.... please... not go back down the fucking well of conspiracy? It was like trying to get rid of fire ants in a sugar factory to get the tinfoil hat crowd back in their dark holes the first time. And, if I may, the damage they did and have done since is incalculable.
No matter what else happened on that September morning, or in the lead up to 9/11, or in the days after, a few things are true. Two buildings that were icons of the American skyline, populated by thousands daily, on the edge of a city of millions, burned and fell. The Pentagon was struck by a third plane and people died there in our nation's capitol. People on airplanes were weaponized as hostages and lost their lives. And, on one plane, the hostages realized their coming fate and fought back, saving others, but not themselves.
We know the structural reasons why the buildings fell. We know who was on the planes. We know the motivation of the hijackers and who funded them.
Many of us know, personally, what it was like to live with grave uncertainty for the next months, into years, and what it was to be an adult who had witnessed a world-changing event. And watch in disbelief as the world got worse.
If you want to know who won after the attacks? It wasn't some dopes cosplaying martyrs and soldier fighting a holy war. It was the worst people in our country, who used what happened to make the world darker, to profit off fear.
There was a brief window before they mobilized where it seemed the attacks had unified and galvanized not just the US, but countries around the world. Horror came to our shores, and countries we'd helped support and defend leapt to our side. And we've spent 25 years making them wonder why they did it.
As is always true, for younger people the past is a distant country, its people unknowable. But as with so much else, those people you think of as inscrutable foreigners are right here. We remember. Some of us were just out of college and working our first jobs, unsure if we were about to get conscripted. We're online with you. We don't talk about it, because there's either nothing to say or everything to say. It absolutely changed our lives no matter who we were or where we were.
The people who post about 9/11 and have filled the internet with pet theories? Those are people who cannot get past the idea that the entire world changed and it wasn't about them somehow. So they'll bend reality to fit into the narrative as the great detective or truth-teller. Become important in their version of events.
They are bad people.
I recall getting to college and making a Charles Whitman joke in the shadow of the University of Texas tower. I'd grow to feel awkward and sick about it later. It doesn't take long on campus before you learn to keep your goddamn mouth shut and some things leave an echo through time for those who were there, and the people who come to understand what the event really meant. And that day, only 17 people died.
Some things are bigger than us. All we can do is stand back and see those events for what they were and live in shock we saw them happen.
I wasn't in New York, but I was in gigantic pyramid in America's most sinful city, with a beam of light shooting from the roof, reaching into the heavens. I could see the airport from my window. Yeah, I had *no* idea what would happen that week. Or when we finally took to the air and winged our way home.
So on 9/11, I don't just mourn what happened that day or the year after. I mourn who we became after it happened.
