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I was supposedly on my mother’s lap in front of the television watching the events of September 11, 2001 unfold. I would’ve been three years old and barely conscious of anything around me, so I have no direct memory of what happened. What I do remember shortly afterward is being constantly reminded that 9/11 was the worst day in American history. As a zillennial cusper (too young to be a core millennial, but too old to be a complete zoomer), I’m perhaps among the last generation of young people who grew up being fully aware that al-Qaeda’s terrorist attacks on U.S. soil opened the new century and changed the world forever.
Today is, unbelievably, the 25th anniversary of 9/11. It is naturally a day of somber remembrance for the nearly 3,000 people who were murdered. The tragedy has continued with thousands more dying of related illnesses in the ensuing years. For the 24th anniversary, I visited the 9/11 Memorial & Museum. As I wrote last year, you will paradoxically never find a more peaceful location in all of New York City. Despite once being the horrific site of people being forced to jump out of the Twin Towers and those buildings ultimately collapsing into rubble, the utmost effort has been put into crafting a pensive space that honors the victims and tells their stories.
Anyone who travels to New York should take an afternoon to be where the One World Trade Center rises out of the ashes of its predecessor. And yet, it is difficult to ignore a painful truth: living memory of 9/11 is fading into history. America is already long past the milestone where everyone born before September 11, 2001 is now an adult. Young men and women who came into the world that year were old enough to serve in Afghanistan before the disastrous withdrawal of U.S. troops two decades later. According to Gallup, only 16 percent of Gen Z believes that their lives had changed because of 9/11, but that shouldn’t be surprising. How could they have a concept of life before it?
Important events will naturally become less relevant to later generations. What is unbelievable with 9/11 is the speed in which everything has become memory-holed. In 1966, most Americans still understood the gravity of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor even though it had taken place 25 years previously. World War II was baked into the cultural ether through novels, films, songs, and other media. Younger adults who did not fight overseas remembered growing up with the domestic war effort as part of their childhoods. WWII veterans were also around to remind everyone. The New York Times reported that hundreds of survivors traveled to Honolulu and that there was no shortage of commemoration. People were not going to forget anytime soon.
But perhaps the biggest difference between 1966 and 2026 is what kind of war Americans are living after. Afghanistan, which the United States initially invaded with good justification to eradicate the terrorist cells which trained al-Qaeda, ended in disarray because it turned into a failed nation-building enterprise. Iraq, while slowly improving since the removal of Saddam Hussein, has suffered through years of regional instability and civilian casualties. It was hardly a glorious win and veterans have very mixed feelings toward their role in the conflict. The decisive Allied victory over the Axis powers in 1945, on the other hand, was an essential part of what made Americans believe that their country was a great nation. There is no longer a WWII-like mythology for people of all generations to get behind.
The briefest moments after 9/11 probably marked the last time when such unity was still possible. George W. Bush saw a record-high 90 percent approval rating in early October amid his initial words of reassurance to the American people. Four years and one unpopular war later, however, and public sentiment turned against the president. I believe that this shift in national mood would have eventually happened even without Iraq. The last quarter of a century has been defined by rapid advancements in technology, which in turn has radically transformed how information is distributed.
There were no smartphones or social media when 9/11 happened. While it is often referred to as the most photographed event in American history, no public images inside the Twin Towers above the impact zone where the planes hit are known to exist. Relatively little footage of American Airlines Flight 77 smashing into the Pentagon was recorded and the United Airlines Flight 93 crash site in Shanksville, PA was essentially in the middle of nowhere. Most at the World Trade Center who shot footage of people jumping to their deaths made a conscious effort to not capture them hitting the ground. The Falling Man photograph was highly controversial upon its release despite its lack of explicit gore. The implication alone was gruesome enough.
I mention all this because 9/11 arguably marked the last time when there was restraint with how a major tragedy of this scale was covered, but also when traditional media still controlled what was shown to the public. News outlets and professional journalists largely stuck to the facts while respecting the dignity of the victims. The worst imagery of that day either remains locked away in private collections or was never put to film in the first place. If 9/11 happened today, nothing would be left to the imagination and there would be no shortage of endless carnage livestreamed to the internet.
For better or worse, we are all now cameramen and self-proclaimed reporters because of the supercomputers in our pockets. Virtually every moment of daily life is recorded and then discussed 24/7 on social media where there is simply too much information for our minds to adequately process. Human beings did not interact with each other on this scale in 2001. 9/11 conspiracy theories of course existed 25 years ago, but they were mostly relegated to niche circles of nuts who few took seriously. Today, the conspiracies quickly overtake the facts as the dominant narrative because they attract the mosts clicks and views.
At the same time, distrust of institutions and experts did not come out of nowhere. The dubious justifications for the Iraq War are why large swaths of the American public refused to ever trust their government again. And while the political right bears considerable responsibility for the erosion of the public’s confidence, it was not just their doing. Left-leaning journalists and academics have constantly downplayed the existential threat of radical Islam, instead choosing to frame all criticism of the Muslim world as racism or xenophobia. Even after 9/11, many privileged Westerners still cannot wrap their heads around the idea that certain religious beliefs are incompatible with Western society.
You cannot compel young people to “never forget” 9/11 when they are in no position to remember. Gen Z was raised in a environment far more politically polarized than during the Bush years. Their defining generational moment was not al-Qaeda’s attacks on the United States, but living through a pandemic which forced everyone indoors, upended their lives, destroyed their social interactions, and ruined their already shaky economic prospects. While worried if they’ll ever get onto the housing ladder or live as securely as their parents, a thousand things on social media are competing for their attention. Being terminally online has indoctrinated a worrying number of zoomers into antisemitic conspiracy theories and siding with the late Osama bin Laden himself.
25 years later, what truly is the legacy of 9/11? It must be accepted that the event has transitioned away from living memory and into old history much faster than any of us could have ever predicted. The best we can hope for now is that those who do care continue to prioritize educating others. Against my own expectations, many of the people online working to preserve the lost media around 9/11 are actually Gen Z users. The 9/11 archive on Reddit is an valuable treasure trove of crucial information. Its admins have reached out to survivors for their stories, and there are active efforts underway to recover unseen footage which is stuck on decaying analog media.
For as easy as it is to be pessimistic that 9/11 will be forgotten, I don’t think that all hope is lost. Young people in this age are no less capable of empathy and appreciating the past. It is only the new challenges of their generation which are preventing them from understanding the full context. A curious mind with a genuine drive to learn, however, has no limitations regardless of age. The amount of Gen Z archivists dedicated to documenting 9/11, even its most esoteric aspects like the muzak which played in the plaza of the Twin Towers before the very end, is proof of that. Perhaps “never forget” is no longer an adequate phrase. How we record history for those who read about 9/11 a century from now is the bigger problem to tackle.
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