On 9/11, as a thirteen year old, I remember very clearly not understanding the gravity of the situation until the first building fell. Our class had been interrupted during a standardized test by the gym teacher who turned on the news. Shortly after, the second plane hit. The explosion put a quick end to most of the middle school chatter. As I watched flames flicker, almost like a candle except for the scale, I tried to make sense of what was going on. I knew it was important, but it was somehow inaccesible. Even with the second plane, a new open wound searing across an old television, it almost seemed a matter of a world outside of mine, outside of the suburban quiet. And then debris and rubble tumbled, smoke billowed and in a short moment, there was only one twin tower. “That was a skyscraper, a huge structure,” I thought that morning, “that was where people worked and toured and now it’s gone.” It was such a meaningful thought to me, so powerful. Events abstracted by TV waves became not only evident but personal, near to my guarded life. As a thirteen year old, I watched thousands of people die and felt uninvolved. But with the loss of a single building, I was inextricably connected.
The impact of those planes was felt for me directly through the buildings themselves, through steal and concrete. It was the collapse of a singled office building—a collection of corner offices that kept mother from daughter and cubicles that kept father from son—that signaled the severity of what was happening. These were places for making money. The World Trade Center wasn’t even a place for craft or passion, but solely for securing wealth. On New York vacations, like mine six months prior, it was a stop that held nothing more than grumbling and the occasional view. And yet the loss of it was felt more strongly in my young mind than watching hundreds of people die in an instant or hundreds more deciding to leap to their death rather than burn. It is empty materialism at its most powerful—symbols of modernity that hold more power than the lives of people I supposedly share a culture with: a well chosen target, perhaps. But as walls crumbled and debris fell, I finally understood the fact that a new era had begun.
Looking back now I realize innocence died. My innocence as well as that of the age itself. Of course I didn’t understand the global class politics or the Capitalistic over-development at the time. That came later. But when that tower fell, and then the next, my young brain recognized the permanent mark that had been made. Even then, even while so unaware of the world, I knew the supreme optimism of the 90s was gone. The simplistic goodness that surrounded life in that time had suffered a fatal blow. For various people that goodness was found in the growing environmentalist movements or in the WTO protests in Seattle; or in the rampant globalization movements that those environmentalists and protestors opposed. But both sides suffered, as we can now see through the lens of 9/11, from a supreme lack of depth. They were white washed movements, paint stretching to cover the cracks that were exploited in 2001. And once the planes hit, the Capitalist values that guided the American decade were defunct. The wholesomeness that was so ubiquitous had evaporated, the unquestionable progress of that era now seems so childish. A mere decade ago seems so out of touch with the world that exists today. Being a teenager at the time of the attacks, I am perfectly situated in history to experience childhood during the effervescent 90s and adulthood in the aftermath, in Iraq and Afghanistan. In losing the World Trade Center I lost both the naive jubilation of youth and the cultural milieu that formed it.
The social understanding of 9/11 is therefore one which governs the totality of my interaction with the political world, with political subjectivity itself. The evil of 9/11 was profound, and in it’s awful power it has made known the rumblings that went unnoticed during the end of the millenium. It was a redefinition through terror and murder. Our response must therefore be equally profound: without justifying the act we must recognize our complicity in the era which birthed, even necessitated 9/11. This is not to say Al Qaeda are at all just or right. Quite the opposite: it is to say that 90s Capitalism and its attackers are part of a political sequence in which a building holds more meaning than a person. The political dialogue since the towers fell has been a grand effort to fit the attack into previous subjective frameworks; to preserve the optimism of infinite growth economics and claim 9/11 as an event on which to launch even higher along the same path. But that day should serve as reminder of the totality of the age in which income disparity grew, in which Sudanese and Rwandans were murdered in plain view of the world, in which the ethical bankruptcy of Capitalism matured into the torturous vapidity of ever-lengthening work days in middle management. We must instead find a radical break from the last millenium and build anew with a new politics, a new subjectivity in which community—that ideal so often discussed but never achieved in the days after September 11—stands at the center. We failed in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is no question of that. But with the death of Bin Laden, perhaps we can finally let go of the bloodlust (as George Bush claimed there was, without any sense of disappointment in it) and focus instead on repairing the cracks which were masked in neon during the Clinton years, which were decried as the evil of Islam in the Bush years, and rebuild a new and coherent politics.
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