The following is a thought experiment. Over this piece, I intend to explore the impact of memory through a moment that has come to define America’s 21st century: The World Trade Center Attacks on September 11, 2001. It is said that everyone who was alive and cognizant at the time has some vivid memory of where they were when they heard the news. It has been equated to The Attack on Pearl Harbor, or The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. These moments are so shocking, so pivotal that they come to define a generation’s collective psyche. It is without a doubt that 9/11 still shows influence in modern discourse, informing how many of us interact still. My goal is hopefully to find my own truth in this that, while unextraordinary, is reflective of where I was, as Alan Jackson so elegantly put it, when the world stopped turning.
To provide some background, let’s begin with formalities. My name is Thomas M. Willett of Long Beach, CA. Born in 1989, I was 12 on 9/11 and attending middle school at the time. I had transferred from another school following a terrible year of being bullied. In more recent years, I’ve begun to look at the impacts that this sense of isolation and rejection has taken long-term on me, and is some ways informative of what’s to follow. I was a new student at the school. It was small, so there wasn’t a sense that I was a small fish in a big pond, but more that I was missing so many social cues. Most of the group felt like they had been together for five grades before I showed up. They had their own interior world and I had to struggle to fit in. This isn’t to say that they weren’t friendly, but only so much effort can be made in a matter of weeks when discussing 9/11 – a traumatic event for everyone, one where you turned to people you could be vulnerable with and just let loose your insecurities.
This isn’t to say that I didn’t have it with family, but there was no history with the people that I had spent roughly eight hours a day with throughout that time. We got our education like students were supposed to, but it’s really difficult to feel like much was discussed that sustained in my memory. The only thing that came to mind was a day sometime after when we were gathered in class and the subject inevitably came up. People mentioned their own fears and concerns. One of the more comical revelations was the conspiracy that 9/11 could be written in a Microsoft Word font to depict a plane crashing into two tours. It was silly and juvenile, but that’s middle school for you: a generation who couldn’t fully process the events, helpless to all the change.
But to back up a bit. Let’s shift the attention back towards where I was when I first learned the news. It was a normal day. I had gotten up for school and had everything ready to go. The usual procedure was to pile into the truck and head to school. Nothing too exciting. When you’re not expecting life-changing news, a morning can seem so mundane. Father would play 95.5 KLOS as we drove, Mark and Brian doing their regular routine. In more recent years, KLOS has taken to broadcasting the entire feed from that day live, reveling in the detail of sober silences as they try to collect details, remaining calm and collected in order to avoid panic. I cannot tell if my father was listening in 2001, but he has in more recent times.
I wasn’t even out the door. He meets me in the hallway and proceeds to usher me into the living room. I can almost stand exactly where I was that day still, overlooking a TV mounted in the corner.
An issue for me is that for the longest time I lacked an understanding of the severity of this image. Before I would ever sit on the second floor of my parents’ workplace and watch bodies fall from several floors up, where firefighters dug through the rubble, where newscasters tried to fill the umpteenth hour of coverage with deep, passionate concern. I don’t think I directly knew somebody who had lost a family member at the time. I was born and bred as a west coast child who only lived out of state briefly in Texas as a three-year-old. I had no national context for this moment. To me, it was just a building that was destroyed. A plane had flown into it, and I saw it more as a weird mishap that happened from time to time.
I most notably think of The Simpsons gag where Homer paints a building sky blue moments before a helicopter flies into it. That is the level of severity my 12-year-old brain could fathom. It was an accident. Even if a second plane would appear, this felt like some surreal coincidence.
In more recent conversations, I have turned to my mother to try and provide context. I was 12, itself a hindrance to remembering a lot. You don’t remember much from your youth, especially when you’re 20 years removed. What she provided were a series of interesting context clues. Whereas I have a vague memory of the day, she is able to ground it more into time frames. Supposedly, she was driving home when the second plane hit The World Trade Center and found it surreal that she couldn’t visually see it.
She also claimed something that felt strangely symbolic of my own experience. When she dropped me off at school, she noticed that there were several parents gathered around, trying to comfort each other. The act itself was rational, but my mother was struck with the discomfort that she didn’t know these people. There was no purpose to be vulnerable with them at this moment. To close up the metaphor, Back to School Night was on 9/11 (that night). It was reasonably canceled, but it also put us at a strong disadvantage for the first year at a new school not only unable to connect socially but in whatever programs the school would enforce.
There is a part of me that feels like my big takeaway from 9/11 was a difficulty to open up to others. Much like the previous year that saw me lose entire friend groups, I had this piece of me that wasn’t able to connect with those around me. I’m unwilling to comment on ways it maybe has made it difficult to open up in later years, but it definitely feels like that two-year span created a juvenile hesitancy that informed how I took to the world.
Because that’s the thing. Most of my memories going forward were not directly driven by talking to anyone about anything. I’m sure my parents comforted me. I’m sure I listened to President George W. Bush say something about it, or falsely believe the Rudy Giuliani being saintly narrative of the time. Again, these are details that feel picked up from osmosis, from consuming culture and narrative rewrites from other people. It’s hard to honestly know what was directly mine because in some respects it was a communal moment, where everyone’s experience informed each other’s.
Which makes it odd that a lot of the further details I discovered were largely hearsay. I was working part-time at my grandparent’s business. Any hour not spent in school I spent there, twiddling away either in the downstairs office, or upstairs which was essentially where we watched cartoons and did homework. Sometimes I would go on assignments with staff members, notably this man who had a knack for playing conservative talk radio. Given that at the time I was attending a Catholic school, it makes sense that I was surrounded by certain ideologies. I didn’t know which were morally superior, so I just took them as ambiguously good. With that said, a running joke with this man was my general disdain for talk radio, eager to flip it over to 106.7 KROQ.
But for some reason, a lot of the events felt like I discovered them via radio, or somebody who had just listened to one. If adults were involved, they were talking through the events while I listened, not entirely sure how to respond myself. I want to say that it’s how I learned about the other plane crashes. I remember hearing the man grow relieved when he mentioned a flight attendant aboard the plane preserving the seat information either to a Black Box or ground control, allowing for further inspection to take place. Of course, I was with them on a job when I picked up a Los Angeles Times a few months later and discovered we were going to war.
Meanwhile, upstairs I grew annoyed at how immersive the coverage was. Minute to minute, it was all that they showed. I couldn’t fathom why the news didn’t take a break, to show reruns of Animaniacs midday as a brief respite (similarly, The WB’s new series like Reba were postponed). It threw off my schedule, and some days were more tolerable than others when it came to watching the TV. I remember telling mom “When are we going to get back to normal?” and she was just kind of nodding along with me. Again, I had no grasp of the severity.
I would watch the benefit concert. I would hear the Alan Jackson song and found it so moving. I would hear this abysmal tribute and never forget how awful and dated its list of musicians was. The patriotism didn’t bother me (though we did sing “God Bless the U.S.A.” once or twice at school events where we loved to change the line to “And I won’t forget the men who died/At least it wasn’t me”). I wasn’t yet aware of the racial profiling that would occur, nor any reason to believe that what followed was a controversial moment in history. I was just there, unsure of how to process everything while a tower lit the screen, smoke spurting from the side. I remember stories about people escaping down the flights of stairs, trapped in elevators, and various other horrifying situations. I understood why that was scary, but to say I fully knew why Osama Bin Laden was to be feared is not entirely true. In some ways he was continually mocked, trying to take the sting out of his menace in-between hostage videos that made the evening news.
On a personal level, I was still discovering myself and defining my tastes. Sure I listened to Top 40 songs that my new friends were. We bonded over a love of Blink-182. P.O.D., by coincidence, released their album “Satellite” on 9/11 and it felt like a prescient album for the time. At a Catholic school, it was Christian rock that was actually good. “Alive” felt affirmative. “Youth of the Nation” spoke to a Post-Columbine era. It was an interesting time when MTV’s Total Request Live had a diverse line-up when pop-punk was breaking into the mainstream. Eminem was only a few months away from criticizing the war with “Square Dance,” aptly pointing out a logical fear of the time for me: that I would be drafted simply because at a certain point I would become the right age. In “Without Me,” he went on to mock Bin Laden and start an inescapable year of tomfoolery with at least five more hits.
The truth is that trying to understand where I was on 9/11 is a bit difficult. A lot of that time has been forgotten, turned into secondhand information. I remember the fear of living in Los Angeles County, where a potential attack was predicted (they even cleared everyone out), thinking that we were next. There was paranoia for a while. The airports changed almost overnight. So much of the world before that was gone, unable to connect me to a past that I recognized. It doesn’t make me special, just aware of how difficult it is to draw a straight line.
I think of it in comparison to 2020 with Coronavirus. It’s sometimes difficult to remember a time before, even if I was an adult. I’m sure the sensory functions will kick in if life returns enough back to normal, where I am not calculating every decision. Even then, it’s hard to remember emotionally beforehand, of what it was like to have some relief in public spaces. I think in some ways it’s worse socially because at least with 9/11 there was a sense of unity. Sure there were bad country songs about extremists sticking boots in places, but it didn’t feel like they weren’t keeping the fellow man down. It’s all a bit disillusioning and has done plenty to wreck my mental health over the now years.
To me, it’s incredible to hear where other people were on that day. Now that 20 years have passed, it’s interesting to hear from perspectives that range from adults to high school students to those even younger than me. I hear about them gathered in their school after gym class or hanging out with their father. I hear so many and it creates perspective. Together we’ve created the theory that it was a life-changing moment, especially for The Millennials. As Euphoria showed in a very attention-grabbing opening, the 9/11 attacks predicated 20 years of disasters. What reason is there to believe that things will ever get better?
A strangely timeless message in 2001 came from Blink-182’s “Anthem Part Two” which declared “If we’re fucked up, you’re to blame.” Of course, that line was more general protest, not geared at any particular event. Years before the Boomer backlash, there was Tom Delonge setting them straight on an album whose title was a sexual innuendo.
For what it’s worth, 2001 was a pivotal year for me. I would change into somebody more confident in themself. I’m far from the person I was then, but strangely Post-2001 was much more rewarding to me. I made friends that I’ve kept for years, figured things out about myself that have made me happier. I’m not perfect, but as far as uncertainty goes, things have gotten clearer at least for me. I may not be able to recall 9/11 in vivid detail and differentiate the day from nights watching Mad TV or Adam Sandler comedies, but it’s all part of the tapestry of trying to survive, to find some deeper connection.
I understand the date as a tragedy. I’m aware that a lot of lives were changed and honestly their stories are more important on this anniversary. Considering that this is a page that sometimes veers into the semi-autobiographical territory, I just felt the need to commemorate with a thought exercise that I hope you do for yourself. A mind is an incredible tool, especially what it chooses to hold onto. I’m sure you can show me a moment from 9/11 and it will resonate, but I won’t know if it was because of where I was or where the photographer was. I just have to guess and be grateful that it still makes me never forget that day.
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