Like many people, I remember exactly where I was 25 years ago today.
I was working my first software job. We heard rumors that a plane had struck one of the towers, and we assumed it was a Piper Cub or something similar.
We soon realized it was not.
From Yahoo News
Being geeks, we tried CNN.com, an online news source even in those earlier days of the web.
Unsurprisingly, we could not reach it. Many other people had the same idea, and the servers crashed under the traffic.
A colleague went home and grabbed an old black-and-white television. It was a relic from a time when color televisions cost enough that people kept an older, small B&W set in the kitchen to watch the news while making dinner, or in the basement den to watch the ball game.
He brought the TV into the office and set it on an open desk. We gathered around it and watched, dumbfounded, as the day unfolded.
Both of my grandmothers were still alive then. After I moved away from Rhode Island and made my home in Colorado, I wrote to them every month.
I was the first grandchild on either side of the family to move so far away, and I felt it was important to send letters regularly. I wanted these two women, who had meant so much to me growing up, to know that I still thought of them as I started a new life two thousand miles away.
The events of September 11 were no different. I wanted to write to my grandmothers.
They had been young women when Pearl Harbor occurred, so I wanted their perspective. Did September 11 feel similar? Did they sense that they had awakened to a different world?
They wrote back and said yes. The world had changed in both 1941 and 2001.
I no longer have those letters, but I have never forgotten their answer.
The long shadow of World War II and the Cold War that followed arguably ended that day.
Here we are, 25 years later. The world is a very different place. What historians commonly call “The American Century” has ended.
And all I can think about is a classic Onion headline: FBI Uncovers Al-Qaeda Plot to Just Sit Back and Enjoy Collapse of United States
What seemed darkly humorous in 2014 now reads more like historical analysis.
The terrorist attacks changed our country. We centralized more power, traded civil liberties for the promise of security, and fought wars that consumed blood and treasure while weakening us politically, economically, and morally.
If The Onion article proved prescient, perhaps a song covered by John Prine provides the eulogy:
My grandmothers came of age as the American empire rose. They were elderly women when its decline began.
I wonder what they would write to me today?