9/11, My Birthday, and America’s Evolving National Memory
Courtesy of NY Daily News.
Perhaps no combination of numbers, no date, is more imbued with emotion and meaning in American culture than nine-eleven. To almost every American, that utterance immediately conjures a specific set of words, images, and feelings. Twenty years later, it is still at the forefront of many of our memories.
When I hear “nine-eleven,” however, I often think about being born. I was born the day before the towers came down. September 10, 2001. To some of my peers, this is a helpful mnemonic device for remembering my birthday, although most of them probably don’t think about it at all. But adults are always intrigued by this. Throughout my life, aunts, uncles, older cousins, parent’s friends, and friend’s parents have remarked and questioned me about it. To this day, I’ve never really known what to say.
Maybe the adults in my life are so intrigued because I am the living representation of the time that has elapsed since 9/11. My birthday is the first reminder of its anniversary. It feels so fresh in their minds, yet suddenly I’m eight. I’m ten years old and I stand five feet tall. I’m a teenager. I remember my freshman year of high school, on September 11th, an administrator I didn’t know made a note of it at an assembly. “Some of our freshmen were born around or after 9/11,” I remember her saying. “Alexander Del Greco the day before. I don’t think you realize how special that is.”
It didn’t feel that special—at least for me. But for her, I was part of that first cohort of post-9/11 babies, the first she’d encountered in years of working with high schoolers. And we kept advancing on. We graduated high school. Last year, we became adults (legally speaking, at least). Some of us went off to college.
Practically every American over the age of 25 remembers where they were on that day. Millennials were in school, their routine Tuesday mornings suddenly hijacked by tragedy. Generation X and the Baby Boomers were their teachers and parents. Maybe they heard it on the radio driving to work, or maybe they watched it on TV. I was at the Ronald Reagan Medical Center in Los Angeles, although I certainly don’t remember it. I think I can say the same for virtually every current Swattie. The last couple graduating classes’ collective memory of the event must be hazy at best. These are real adults now (to me at least), out in the world. Soon we will be, too.
Part of adults’ reaction to my birthday is discomfort. Discomfort toward their own aging, yes, but an equal discomfort in response to this generation’s creeping march forward, one that signals an increasing detachment from their cultural and political paradigms. 9/11 was formational: it was the single most defining event of 21st-century American politics. The adult memory of 9/11 is one of sorrow but also of an emerging unity. It was about American flags flying in every yard and storefront. Republicans and Democrats mourning together. George W. Bush throwing a strike in the World Series. A nation that would “Never Forget.”
Of course, that unity was a lie. Middle Eastern and Muslim Americans didn’t feel it when hate crimes skyrocketed. Still, there was a palpable feeling, a renewal of patriotism and togetherness. The mainstream spats over police were pushed aside as the nation came together to express its gratitude for first responders. Similarly, advocates of restraint in Iraq were brushed off amidst popular and bipartisan support.
Plenty of older Americans now see the failure that took place in Iraq (48% compared to 22% in 2003). Many of them may now harbor a greater degree of skepticism toward the police. However, the cultural paradigms left behind by 9/11 continue to linger. The United States is a sometimes misguided but ultimately benevolent force on the international stage. We hear these comments on MSNBC and Fox News alike. They’re reinforced in our movies and on TV. The police, however many bad apples they may have, are still a force for good.
As younger people, however, our lack of memory surrounding 9/11 helps us break free from these assumptions. Sure, they’re present in the early education we receive, the media we consume. Many of our parents also passed down these beliefs. But to a surprising degree, our generation is largely de-conditioned.
Some of us have been unlucky enough to experience the police brutality or the worst excesses of post-9/11 imperialism firsthand. Police targeting Black Americans (among other communities of color) or American armed forces disregarding human rights abroad are not exactly new phenomena. Plenty of our predecessors have been fighting these fights for decades, even centuries, before we were born. For those individuals affected firsthand by these problems, they have plenty of salient experiences to base a political doctrine around. For those of us lucky enough not to experience those horrors, however, events like 9/11 may come to fill the gaps of our national consciousness.
Some critics have likened contemporary social movements to the swell of domestic civil rights and anti-war protests of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Others may think it’s our generation’s hubris that deludes us into believing that we, as a generation and a country, are amidst an equally formative moment for American politics. But I’m not sure that it’s a coincidence that those movements came one generation removed from the conclusion of WWII. 9/11 was but one of many of these nation-forming moments—D-Day, the JFK assassination, etc.—whose effects reverberated for decades afterwards in our politics and in our minds. These moments enter the national consciousness rapidly and fade slowly. They are reproduced ad nauseum in media and culture for years, decades, even centuries afterwards. Yet with each passing generation, they fade. The visceral impact of watching the planes hit the towers in real time becomes a memory of learning about 9/11 through books and movies. And suddenly, for anyone under 25, it’s not so visceral.
This mismatch of our generation’s outlook on America and our parents’ is a source of tension, just as I’m sure our parents had with theirs. I think I share the experience with a lot of Swatties when I argue with my liberal parents about these points of inflection in our politics, my views on the police and military among them. The word that best describes their reaction is incredulity. My dad, whose tirades against Kissinger, Nixon, and the Vietnam War were formative moments in my political childhood, still acts shocked when I say the U.S. is a malevolent force internationally. Sometimes I myself am incredulous when all their experiences and thoughts still, sometimes, add up to what I consider to be reactionary opinions. But when I think about 9/11, it makes an iota more sense.
My parents think I don’t understand them, and they’re right. I can’t really imagine the roller coaster of emotions they must have faced in September 2001, from the joy (I think?) of my birth to the sorrow of the following day. And maybe they struggle to grapple with the fact that no matter how much I grow I will never be them, that I inherited some of their facial features and some of their tastes in food but a generation of experience and memory sets us apart.
If you asked me a year ago what the defining moment of our generation would be, I’m not sure I would have given you the right answer. Almost twenty years after 9/11, the Covid-19 pandemic laid bare the deep inequalities of our society and generated new ones. Between the lockdown in March, the protests of the summer, and whatever is to come following the election, it feels like we are living through history.
I don’t know what the residual effects of this moment will be. Maybe we’ll be wearing masks and sanitizing for years, or maybe the latter half of 2021 will signal a return to normalcy. Maybe the new markets and the new subcultures generated by the pandemic will disappear as quickly as they came, or maybe they will persist. I suspect reality lies somewhere in the middle. Whatever it is, the socio-political legacy of 2020 will be something. It will affect our lives and it will affect our kids’ lives. But just like 9/11, that memory too will fade.