I’m driving to New York on Friday.
When my good friend said he was having his birthday party on Sept. 11, my reaction was, “You’re having a party on the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks?”
After all these years, the anxiety remains. For so long, many of us waited for the other shoe to drop.
For years, the anniversary would induce a feeling I often describe as “bricks on my chest.” At the time of the attacks, I was living in the D.C. suburbs of Maryland, had two young children, and was working for The Washington Post’s website as the national/political editor.
We weren’t too crazy into the 24/7 news cycle yet, and newsrooms still had a certain drumbeat to them. Summers were lazy for the most part — although that summer Washington was swept up in a scandal involving a D.C. intern who had disappeared.
I spent much of the summer working with one of our columnists on a package of stories involving the tax code that was set to be unveiled on Sept. 11. That seems almost quaint now.
In 2001, The Post’s website was a separate operation, located in Arlington, Virginia, a few metro stops away from The Post’s historic print operation. My building was about a mile away from the Pentagon as the crow flies. My colleagues and I could see smoke billowing from the Pentagon after the attack there.
The website’s building was at the top of a hill right over the Key Bridge in Arlington, and planes would often pass by our building on their landing pattern into Reagan National Airport. I remember standing with a colleague in the middle of the newsroom as the fourth plane (headed to D.C.) was still up in the air when he said: “We’re right in the flight path.” For reasons that were probably not the smartest, we stayed at our desks.
We spent the day as fact-checkers, knocking down rumors of car bombs going off at the National Mall along with a host of others while National Guardsmen stood on D.C. street corners and helicopter gunships flew down the Potomac River.
As the news broke that day, I struggled between my role as a father and that as a journalist. Students often ask me how best to cover tragedy and how I handled 9/11 and the weeks and months afterwards. I usually mention how journalists try to compartmentalize their emotions. It wasn’t easy that day. And, I’m still not sure I shouldn’t have grabbed my kids, jumped into a car, and driven into the mountains somewhere.
It’s a decision that continues to haunt me.
A few weeks after the attacks, I remember discussing the future with another friend in New York where I said: “The world is never going to be the same.”
He lost it. Told me I was exaggerating. I had two young kids, and he had a young daughter, so the implication of my statement was clear: Our kids were going to grow up in a different world.
It’s a world where the Jan. 6 insurrection and Covid are cited as the most important news events in the lives of many college students.
It’s hard to believe it’s been 25 years. And, yes, it’s safe to say the world changed. But are journalists and educators talking about those changes?
Christian Appy, a professor of history at UMass and the director of The Ellsberg Initiative for Peace and Democracy, said there is a litany of changes over the past 25 years that need more discussion in classrooms.
In an email interview, he cited the following as areas educators need to explore more: “The U.S. role in exacerbating Islamic extremism pre 9/11, the negative impact of 9/11 on U.S. foreign policy (the Bush doctrine of preemptive warfare, torture, illegal captures and imprisonment, endless wars, etc.), and the clampdown on civil liberties and constitutional rights at home.”
It’s hard to focus on one area of change in 25 years. Technology. Communication. Foreign policy. Privacy. Law. The presidency. War. Domestic surveillance. Civil liberties.
How do you even begin to describe the time before the 9/11 attacks? Innocence? Obliviousness? A belief in “Fortress America?” All of the above?
The way the world consumed news changed that day. My old boss was fond of saying 9/11 was the true birth of web journalism. Given the time of day (and the lack of televisions in offices or video on phones) most folks turned to their work computers to find out what was happening. The Post had just purchased technology to make it easier to access the website and updated news stories. Many of our competitors’ websites were unavailable for much of 9/11 while The Post was accessible.
After the attacks, I remember working on a project with an al-Qaeda expert who showed us many of the group’s training videos on the Web. The videos were out there in plain view, available for everyone to see. I sat there, baffled, wondering how no one saw the attacks coming. It was an eye-opening experience, and it gave me a glimpse at the future of the Web.
My kids have grown up in a country that has been in a near-constant state of war. They’re adults now, but one of my daughters always calls me on 9/11 to have me talk about the day. It’s therapeutic. I know she will call today.
But now I look at her 3-year-old son — my grandson — and wonder what he will think about the last 25 years when he’s studying U.S. history.
There was a moment in the weeks after the attacks when it looked like the country would unite… right before the U.S. decided to go to war against Afghanistan and then Iraq.
That moment of brief unity disappeared into a vacuum of chants of “you’re either with us or you’re against us” — mentalities that have hit new highs in the second term of the Trump administration.
We haven’t come very far.
Steve Fox is a senior lecturer and sports journalism director for the Journalism Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.