A few thoughts on 9/11

The World Trade Center in March 2001. Wikipedia user JeffMock. 

Today marks the 17th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. The attack that killed almost 3000 people, destroyed the World Trade Center and the Pentagon went down as one of the most transformative events in American history. I have a few random thoughts about it. 

First of all it's shocking to me that there are 17 year old people out there that have no memory of the attack because they were born after it. Those kids have known nothing but a world where terrorism is an ever present threat and has come to be almost routine. In a year they will be able to vote. Crazy. 

Second, 9/11 is one of those watershed moments where everyone knew what they were doing when they heard the news. Much like the Kennedy assassination, the Challenger disaster and Pearl Harbor, everyone has a memory of what they were doing that day. 

In my case I was a freshly graduated 18 year old, just out of high school. I was still trying to figure out what to do with my life so I was still at home with my dad. I was sleeping in that day when my Dad knocked on my door and said "Terrorists crashed airplanes into the World Trade center, would you like to get up?" I of course did and I watched the news for the rest of the day. It was a surreal experience to be sure. 

It also makes me wonder what event is going to be the same impact for children these days. I would have said the Las Vegas attack, which remains the worst mass shooting in American history, but that event has been memory holed so quickly that I doubt anyone will feel the same way they do about it as they do about 9/11. I guess the election of President Trump might count given how tranformative that was, but I doubt a presidential election will have the same kind of reaction people still have towards 9/11. For Europe it's clear that their event was the Paris attacks which horrified the world, but I don't think those attacks had quite the same impact in America as they did in Europe. 

Third, I have to say that things have gotten worse in some ways after 9/11. Despite the hysteria after the attacks terrorism wasn't that much of a threat in the United States afterwards for quite some time. There were plots yes, but most of them failed and failed spectacularly. Though there were the anthrax attacks, which didn't have anything to do with terrorism so to speak, we didn't have a major Islamic attack in America until the Ft Hood shootings in 2009, unless you count the DC beltway sniper case back in 2002 which many people don't. 

Things got worse in the past few years. Ft. Hood was only the beginning as we had several more major terror attacks after that culminating in the horrible Pulse Nightclub shooting. It was as if the world we all feared in in 2001 finally came true in the last years of the Obama administration where there were monthly and almost weekly Islamic terror attacks worldwide. Thankfully, with the defeat of ISIS in Iraq and Syria the threat seems to have subsided but it was clear that terrorism was almost an even more important story in the 2010's than it was in the 2000's despite the obvious and widespread impact of 9/11. 

Finally, I have to say that I am still surprised that the fact that the Saudi Arabian government had ties to the 9/11 attacks didn't make much of an impact. Even though 9/11 conspiracy theories remain all the rage you would have though that the revelation that the government was lying about low level Saudi government officials being involved in the attack would have changed things. Amazingly that story died fairly quickly to the point where people think I am making it up when I talk about it...