A Day To End All Days

Almost a quarter-century later, I'm more stunned by the magnitude of the day's events now than ever before.

Americans kept calm and carried on.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Being fully aware of yesterday’s events, I still intend for today to be about remembering 9/11 and the lives lost that horrific day. Trust that there is much I have to say about more recent happenings, of which I’m still processing and figuring out what to say, and how exactly to say it. Rest assured essays on the murders Iryna Zarutska and Charlie Kirk, along with developments in Europe, are on their way in due time. My intent is always to clarify, not obfuscate, and to focus, not outrage. It’s more important now than ever to live up to those intentions.

I’d also ask that any comments in response to this essay be related to 9/11, not recent events. Again, we’ll have plenty of time to discuss everything else. Thank you for your readership.

For years (yes, this blog has been around for almost four years now!) an essay I wrote in 2022 stood as what I thought would be all I’d ever need to say about 9/11. I strongly considered skipping writing an entry about that awful day this anniversary, saving it for one more year, as September 11, 2026 will be the 25th anniversary of the most traumatic event in American history of my lifetime.

Still, I can’t help but share some additional thoughts about that day for the reason that it remains the most traumatic event of my lifetime. I hope you’ll all read the 2022 essay if you haven’t already, but I also want to share some other things which have come to mind as of late reflecting upon that fateful moment. Almost a quarter-century later, I’m more stunned by the magnitude of the day's events now than ever before.

First, I want to share this YouTube video. It covers the events of 9/11 beginning at 7:46 am to noon Eastern. It’s likely the most complete accounting of the attacks from start to finish that I’ve seen:

There are 9/11 memorials, but no 9/11 museum. This video is likely the closest we’ll get to a 9/11 museum and I’m not sure anyone could do better. The amount of information, synchronizing the broadcast television footage with the air traffic control audio, it’s as close as you can get to a God’s eye view of what happened that day. If you’re an educator, I strongly recommend you show this video to your students if you want to teach them about 9/11, especially if they have no memory of it. In fact, we have an entire generation - Zoomers - entering adulthood en masse who have no recollection of that day, hard as it might be to believe. This video will make them feel as though they’re living it in the moment.

Many things stand out in the video. First is something I’ve said before: the day started off like any other. Looking at the morning’s news coverage, there’s no hint whatsoever that it’s going to be a tragic day. Of course, tragedy seldom announces itself ahead of time, but it’s a reminder that none of ever really know what’s going to happen on a given day. Routine might be boring, but boring can be better than the alternative.

The morning television broadcast portrays what appears to be a perfectly happy society. It’s hard to explain to those who don’t remember, but September 2001 was truly a good time. We weren’t anywhere close to the divided society we are today. If anyone spoke of civil war, they were referring to the one fought from 1861 to 1865. There just wasn’t the non-stop deluge of bad news, scandals, and war like there is today. And no, there were no assassinations.

It’s difficult, even for someone like me who lived to remember how it used to be, to think there was a time when life wasn’t so “interesting,” for a lack of a better term. It’s easy to fall into the trap of nostalgia and see the past through rose-colored glasses, but I don’t think I’m whitewashing pre-9/11 2001 here. Nobody says it was perfect, we’re just saying it was better than now, because it was, in so many ways.

There are also some interesting coincidences the video’s creator astutely points out and can be seen while watching the presentation. At 9:00 (nine minutes into the video, not 9 AM), you see a commercial where a man says he’s not jumping off a building, an unintentional foreshadowing of the horrors to be witnessed later that morning. At 27:55, a paper plane is shown in another commercial flying through the buildings of Manhattan. At 38:55, the late news anchor Joe Krebs of the Washington, D.C. media market’s NBC local affiliate station says, “September 11th” for one of the final times without it being associated with the terror attacks. The video’s creator further notes that Krebs’ voice seems to crack as he says it, and you can hear what he’s talking about. Maybe we’re all hearing something which only sounds strange in retrospect, but still, it’s interesting. In a separate video, an anchor on CBS’ The Early Show infamously remarked that things are “too quiet” around the country 15 minutes before the first plane struck the World Trade Center.

Watching the TV broadcast and listening to the air traffic control (ATC) audio at the same time is a study in contrasts. On TV, you see pleasant normalcy. On the ATC audio, you hear a mystery turn into an increasingly concerning situation as American Airlines Flight 11, the first to be hijacked, stops responding to radio calls. That concern turns into urgency after it hits WTC 1. Then more planes get hijacked. The gravity of the situation, that sinking feeling, sets in. When WTC 2 is struck, then you know: this is war. Finally, you look down at the video’s length and realize the most devastating terrorist attack in history was done and over with in little over four hours. But the nightmare is just beginning.

Without being too specific, I live in the Western part of the U.S. It always struck me how early in the day the attacks took place. This means, when the first plane struck the WTC at 8:46 AM, well into the workday, it was still 5:46 AM on the West Coast. I was living in the Eastern U.S. at the time and I never considered what it must’ve been like for those out West who literally woke up to the worst news imaginable.

I ask my readers to watch a lot of videos. I implore you; watch that video. Yes, it’s over four hours, making it twice as long as most long movies. If you have a smart TV with access to YouTube, let it play, and go about your business. That’ll give it a more realistic feel. Most of us just tried going about our day, anyway, even after we heard the terrible news. And yes, I realize it’s not easy to watch for many of you and that 9/11 isn’t a day many of us want to re-live. I can’t imagine how emotionally exhausting it must’ve been for the video’s creator to put it all together.

However, if you do want to be reminded or experience for the first time what that day was like, you can’t do better than that presentation.

Definitely watch this shorter video:

One of the “nice” things, if you can call it that, with the passage of time has been the amount of personal footage 9/11 that’s surfaced in the last 24 years since the day. 2001 was a high-tech world, but nowhere near as sophisticated as today, and smart phones were still seven years away from introduction, meaning most people didn’t carry around cameras in their pockets. Still, a few people did, and were able to capture the moment on tape (yes, most cameras back then were still on video tape).

Far more people witnessed the second plane hitting the WTC than the first, both in person and on live TV. There’s something about watching the plane as it approaches, all the way to its collision with the tower, that captures how devastating it was.

There are many other personal videos (we called them “home videos” back in the day) out there. This is one was shot by a university student living several blocks away from the WTC with a clear view of the buildings. It, to me, is the closest example of what 9/11 would’ve looked like if smartphones existed back then:

The most disturbing images of 9/11 were, arguably, that of people jumping off the WTC and falling to their deaths. Imagine how dire the circumstances must’ve been, how certain death was, to decide that jumping to your own demise would’ve been the better option. Just thinking about it still troubles me deeply to this day.

I’m not going to post any photos or videos of people falling out of the WTC. I’ll instead post this video of firefighters watching and reacting to the sight of people falling from the sky. It gives you more than enough of a sense of how shocking it must’ve been to witness:

Here’s an emotional interview from years ago with a cameraman who filmed the jumpers:

9/11 was sensory overload, even for those of us who experienced it only on television. I honestly can’t remember another incident in American history which overwhelmed us collectively like it did. More importantly, I don’t know what could at this point. I often remark how 2020 emptied our reservoir of outrage, but it also clearly emptied our collective capacity for feeling, period. We’re no longer angry as one, sad as one. If anything, we’re united only in our collective apathy.

If there’s anything good which came out of 9/11, it’s that unity we felt in its wake, at least while it lasted. It’s about as blunt a demonstration of the duality of life: with darkness comes the light. It forces me to think back to all the other moments in our history where we were unified and how, both in the present context and historical hindsight, seemed impossible.

Here are Blacks and Whites standing shoulder-to-shoulder against a foreign enemy during the Iran hostage crisis:

Remember: this was 1979. The Civil Rights era was barely a decade gone, still fresh on everyone’s minds. Yet the Iran hostage crisis managed to unify a country still processing everything that’d happened the last 20 years.

This was during the 1990-to-1991 Gulf War:

The imagery is more powerful than you can imagine: a Black man with corn-rolls (I’d bet he was a Vietnam veteran) standing side-by-side with a working-class White man, wearing a red cap, no less, in a display of nationalistic solidarity. I’m often mystified by liberals who look so negatively upon nationalism, because clearly, nationalism was what brought all of us, White, Black, all races, all religions, together. You either want unity or you don’t. Beggars can’t be choosers.

Which brings us to probably the most important question of all: what would unite us like we were on 9/12 today? I’ve asked that question many times over the four years writing in this journal. My answer has always been the same: nothing. In the interest of not repeating myself, I’ll answer somewhat differently this anniversary: a war. That’s what it’s going to take to unite and save this country from the road to self-destruction.

But it can’t be any kind of war either. The War On Terror proved woefully insufficient towards providing the sense of purpose necessary to keep America together. It wasn’t anywhere near the scope of the world wars, and there was no “greatest generation,” either. This was because the War On Terror could never fulfill the same purpose that World War II did and the Greatest Generation was a product entirely of circumstance.

I’ve spoken often about the “Fourth Turning,” the period of existential crisis which occurs around every 80 years. World War II ended 80 years ago this year, meaning we’re not just in another Fourth Turning, we’re well in it’s danger zone now. This also means 9/11 was the culminating event of the most recent Third Turning, which is a period of unraveling. History isn’t a grand morality narrative, but it’s a cycle. 9/11 and the subsequent War On Terror could never serve the purpose Pearl Harbor and World War II did, because it couldn’t. Within the historical cycle, it was never the role they were meant to play.

The Fourth Turning will bring another war. It seems unfathomable now, but America will fight another major war soon. I’m not predicting it, I’m just saying that’s what the historical record indicates. The only question is whether this will be a foreign or domestic war. Readers may think that I believe it’ll be the latter, and though I have an informed bias for that possibility, we cannot rule out that it could be the former. Or both. Every Fourth Turning brings about a tremendous crisis which totally upends the world order, so whatever happens to bring that about has to be a cataclysmic event.

It’s coming. Not a soul on Earth can hide from it. I don’t make the rules. History does.

At the end of every Fourth Turning, the country has emerged united and stronger than before. It’s not always a happy unity, but there’s at least a sense of solidarity. I don’t know how we’d manage that now. 2020 was very revealing in how little trust there remains, how frayed the social fabric has become. I don’t see how a war, even an existential conflict, could re-unite this country.

And that’s just it. The only thing that could save us at this point - a war - is also the thing that could do us in for good. I hate to be so dramatic, but just imagine what would’ve been had any of the prior Fourth Turnings ended any other way. What if the U.S. lost World War II? What if the Confederacy managed to maintain its separation from the Union? What if the U.S. never broke away from Britain? Don’t overthink it; I’m not asking any of you to rewrite history. Anyone with even a basic level of knowledge on these events can at least conclude that none of us would be here today, the way we are, in this moment, had our prior Fourth Turnings ended any other way.

It’s with a sense of apprehension, foreboding, but also hope, that I look into the future. By 2035, 10 years from now, the Fourth Turning will have concluded, and we’ll be back to the beginning of another 80-year cycle. Apparently, times are good at the beginning of every cycle, but “good”is a relative term. I’m sure life wasn’t great for the losers of World War II, the American Civil War, and the American Revolution in the aftermath.

We Kept Calm And Carried On

In closing, something I want everyone to consider is that, in the grand scheme of things, 9/11 may end up occupying a lesser place in history than we imagine. That’s not to diminish it's significance, but even World War I, which is still remembered as “The War To End All Wars,” was eventually overshadowed by an even more devastating conflict. In the context of “turnings,” each one is important - you can’t have a Fourth Turning without a Third, after all - but the events we end up remembering the most are the ones which make over the world order. Those are the events of the Fourth Turning. It’s what’s going to happen in the next five to ten years which we’ll remember most when it’s all said and done.

I also want to do something nobody ever really does when talking about 9/11: mention all the good things that have happened. First, terrorism, at least Islamist terrorism, is less of a threat than it was even a decade ago. In Europe, it remains a high threat. But in America, it’s a greatly diminished threat. I don’t know the extent to which is vindicates U.S. post-9/11 foreign and security policy, but let’s at least acknowledge that the bin Ladens of the world don’t pose the same kind of threat to us as they once did. That’s a good thing. It’s been unfortunately replaced by other threats, but such is the way of things. That’s why we always remain vigilant, prepared to fight for our homeland, our people, and way of life.

We all hated how needlessly stressful TSA made the airport experience. I’ve rarely met a TSA agent who left a positive impression on me. Still, from a security standpoint, air travel in the U.S. has become as safe as we can possibly expect it to be. When was the last hijacking? They’ve been far less common in U.S. air travel than our popular media led us to believe. But there was a time when your flight being hijacked was at least a semi-legitimate concern. For most of us, it’s just not a risk we’re ever going to face. We need to also be honest about our expectations: is it more important to avoid another 9/11? Or is it more important for us to be able to enjoy the airport experience as we did when we were young? Perhaps there’s a middle-ground to be had, but you can’t argue against results, either.

Second, we’ve finally managed to leave behind the War On Terror. Sure, it still goes on behind the public view. We still have troops in the Middle East. But the War On Terror doesn’t dominate U.S. foreign policy like it once did. We were going to have to move on from it eventually. I feel like it took too long for us to do so, but it’s over now; we left Afghanistan four years ago, when at one point, it seemed we’d never leave. With all the tumult that lays ahead, we need our troops home for what’s next.

Finally, I want to give a shout-out to the American people. I don’t think we get enough credit for the way we responded to 9/11. Much of the narrative about the way we responded in the aftermath was put in a negative light, as though we all freaked out unnecessarily, as though we were revealed to be decadent and weak in our collective behavior.

I don’t share this view. Not anymore. For the most part, Americans responded admirably. We responded as well as anyone else could’ve. A lot of people tried to compare us to the stoic Brits, who live by the mantra of Keep Calm And Carry On. The presumption is that Americans weren’t calm and didn’t carry on. But that’s not what I saw. That’s not what I remember. Life went on. People showed up to work again in 9/13. Kids went back to school. Yes, things changed. How could it not? But we got back to business. And the way I see it, if you just shrug off the deaths of almost 3,000 of your fellow countrymen as though it were just another day, as the Keep Calm And Carry On crowd insinuated, there’s something seriously wrong with you.

I’d rather live in a country where that sort of thing shakes us to our core, where we share in the grief and suffering of our fellow countrymen, where we lean on each other in hard times. I’d rather live in a country where, for all our differences, we manage to come together when our homeland is under attack, where the one thing which can never be broken is our collective will to survive. That’s what it means to be a nation. Without that, we’re nothing.

That’s what I miss about 9/11, if I miss anything about it. It’s what I’ll always remember, even if the terror of the day manages to fade. If only for a short while, maybe for the final time, we remembered what it means to be a nation. A people. It’s a privilege.

Speaking of privilege, in the wake of the immigration discourse, many liberals have trotted out the line that being born in America isn’t anything to be proud of, nor is it something worth defending too fiercely, since it’s entirely a matter of luck, not choice. I saw a widely-disseminated post on social media expressing this very sentiment during the unrest in Los Angeles earlier this summer. It’s a sentiment borne from nihilism, but it’s also borne from liberal ideology which worships the self, hence the one thing that does matter are your choices, and your choices are always good.

The philosophy behind this thinking is supremely unsound, but leave that aside for now. I don’t remember if this is the social media post I saw earlier this summer, but it closely expresses the sentiments I’m criticizing:

Source

One day, I’ll do a longer-form take-down of this post. There’s nothing innocent about it; it’s full of spite and poisonous lies, and it’s not even clear what this person’s bottom line is. It almost seems like she’s saying “immigrant” is an ethnic identity, a nationality unto itself. But again, leave that be for today, because today’s not the day to expose the stupidity of the cosmopolitan, post-national, over-educated, “Anywhere” class.

We live in a hyper-ideologized time. A symptom of that is people will say unbelievably ridiculous things because that’s what keeps them in compliance with that ideology. That includes what’s being said here: you can only be proud of the choices you make. You cannot be proud of something you had no hand in making so. That includes the accomplishments of your ancestors, your forefathers. By that same logic, nobody should be proud the U.S. won World War II. After all, we were all just fortunate to be born into a world where the U.S. emerged victorious, right?

It calls to mind a passage from Samuel Huntington’s 2004 book Who Are We?, where he quotes a young liberal woman living in New York City a month after 9/11 [bold mine]:

When I was 19, I moved to New York City…. If you asked me to describe myself then, I would have told you I was a musician, a poet, an artist and, on a somewhat political level, a woman, a lesbian and a Jew. Being an American wouldn’t have made my list.

[In my college class Gender and Economics my] girlfriend and I were so frustrated by inequality in America that we discussed moving to another country. On Sept. 11, all that changed. I realized that I had been taking the freedoms I have here for granted. Now I have an American flag on my backpack, I cheer at the fighter jets as they pass overhead and I am calling myself a patriot.

If your reaction was “The more things change, the more they stay the same,” that was exactly my reaction when I first read that passage. That was almost 25 years ago. A full generation plus change. Yet the first paragraph plus the first sentence of the second paragraph are things still being said today. The only difference is, 9/11 happened, and for this young woman, and I’m sure many others, it changed their entire outlook on America, and this simple matter of randomness, the “lottery of birth,” as it were, suddenly meant so much to them.

I’d love to know what came of this young woman from 2001, and how her views have evolved over the years. It’d be beyond interesting to hear her perspective today. It’s also interesting to think about how all of today’s cosmopolitan, post-national, over-educated, “Anywhere” class, including the “proud immigrants,” might change their thinking were another 9/11-level event to happen in this country. Would they snap to their senses, as the lesbian Jewish woman mentioned featured in Samuel Huntington’s book did, and realize how important America truly is to them?

A nation, a country to call your own, is like family. It’s like air. You don’t know how badly you need it until you do. This is why only a war can save us now, because only a war would remind all Americans, including everyone who shared that post on social media, how bad they need this country, how they really are lacking without it.

Or it might convince them their futures aren’t here. Either way, it’d be for the best, wouldn’t it?

That’s it for the 2025 retrospective on 9/11. It’s your turn now - what does 9/11 look like almost two-and-a-half decades afterwards? Has your perspective on the day changed? Anything you realize about the event that never came to mind before? Are there any memories you haven’t shared previously that you’d like to share now?

Talk about it in the comments section.

Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.

If you liked this post from We're Not At the End, But You Can See It From Here, why not share? If you’re a first-time visitor, please consider subscribing!