Twenty-five years since the September 11 attacks, it is trite to say that if Americans as a whole learned anything, they learned none of the right things.
I was in eighth grade at the time, attending a rural school over 2,000 miles from New York City, but nevertheless everyone was still greatly impacted by the human tragedy. However, while the experience of attending a government school had already made me sure the “adults in the room” running society were largely a bunch of morons, this realization went into overdrive upon seeing the reaction to this event. It was one of the times in my life where it suddenly became apparent that few genuinely believed in anything of moral value. To me, our country’s incapacity to use reason has remained scarier, and a bigger threat to my physical safety and personal liberty, than anything terrorists could do.
The worst was the general attitude of, “What did we ever do to anyone?” As for myself, when the United States bombed Serbia when I was in fifth grade, I was quite disturbed that my country was bombing people with strange names in a country I had never heard of for reasons that I did not understand. However, it was treated as normal by what was to me the entire adult population. The school principal was firmly established that if you don’t like how other people live or what they are doing, that it is appropriate to bomb them, even if they pose no threat to you.
There are persistent arguments about what weapons it is appropriate to use or what constitutes acceptable targets, but this misses the fact that being “conventionally” bombed is a horrific way to die—whether it’s the burning of your flesh while you are still alive, being trapped under a building until you suffocate, or alternately surviving with egregious physical and emotional wounds. This isn’t something many Americans think about, and we learned much later that even veterans of the Global War on Terror who volunteered to go to Ukraine went scurrying back to Poland with wet pants the first time they faced the sort of bombing which the American military regularly inflicts on other people. But to the average American, bombing is a quite “civilized,” and even “low impact” or “soft touch” way to deal with random grievances.
It’s unforgivable that anyone believed the central narrative of “They hate us for our freedom.” Firstly, that phrase is largely meaningless. They hate what about it? Voting? Trial by jury? Free markets? Mom? Apple pie? I will give you that Islamists probably do hate our “free speech” insofar as it exports degeneracy to their countries, but it was fairly easy for them to limit that at the time, particularly back when most of the Third World didn’t have the internet. One has to be entirely ignorant about the things which motivate political violence to imagine anyone travels halfway around the world and commits a suicide attack due to hatred of the “freedom” of people they could just as well never meet. Meanwhile, there were few concerns about the post 9/11 rampage which created new terrorists by killing all sorts of random people, the sort of thing that a man may actually travel halfway across the world to avenge. There were endless other platitudes we were meant to believe, that it was a “cowardly” attack, which Bill Maher was famously “canceled” for by pointing out that it doesn’t make sense, given that hijacking planes and flying them into buildings actually takes the deranged courage of a fanatic.
The kicker of all of this, though, was the narrative that to fight these cowardly people who hate us for our freedom we needed to give into fear and give up our freedom. It’s hard to deny that after such an attack some new preventative measures were sensible. But an entire apparatus of oppression was engineered to the applause of the public, who still believed we had done nothing wrong. It wasn’t until Dr. Ron Paul’s celebrated 2007 debate performance in the Republican primaries, when former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani disingenuously accused him of saying Americans “deserved” 9/11, that questions about this narrative broke into the mainstream. As late as the 2016 primaries, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush thought the line, “My brother kept us safe,” would be politically effective, as if only one 9/11 happening during a presidency is some sort of successful record.
None of the above was particularly difficult to understand, even as a child; one would almost imagine a child’s mind is better able to see what was wrong with all of it, but few of my peers seemed to demonstrate any such thing. Like COVID much later, what was hard to believe was how everyone around me was so stupid. Again, I knew there was something wrong with our society, and that people didn’t conceptualize being bombed, and that the adults were largely incompetent, but nevertheless, the thing about the whole affair which shook me to my core was seeing the society we lived in. The public and its leadership are unable to learn about or understand our history or their place in the world, and key narratives about landmark events don’t need to withstand the slightest scrutiny. And yet, I was the bad one for having a muted reaction to the tragedy and not thinking minutes of silence, or going around in matching outfits, accomplished anything. Of course I was monstrous for not wanting to invade Afghanistan and bomb the crippled children there who wouldn’t be able to afford wheelchairs. The bright side is the lessons I learned have served me quite well in life, since this society never wised up, and there is little hope of it doing so.
