“The new war began with pictures of smoke, mushrooming smoke that rose above the busiest skyline in the busiest city in the busiest nation in the world, yellow smoke and white smoke and a deathly shade of gray smoke. Smoke filled with jet fuel, with the debris of airplanes, with the shattered glass of two of the tallest buildings in the world, with the charred flesh of victims, smoke filled with what used to be a uniquely American attitude, one that said, 'We are safe here, we are the biggest, the richest, the proudest, so we are the most secure.'
“That is gone now.”I wrote those words 25 years ago for this newspaper. It was about the last morning of an old America, on the first morning of a new one.
Today, I write a new set of words, not for
people who, like me, actually remember the events of Sept. 11, 2001, but for the third of the United States who cannot remember, because they are too young.
That’s how long 25 years is. A third of the nation has no memory of this event. They view footage. They hear stories. But they cannot feel the shiver of memory. It is, to them, what tales of Pearl Harbor were to Baby Boomers, what tales of the Civil War were to the generation born in its aftermath.
So for you, younger America, we share these thoughts. Many of you are now old enough to vote. Some of you are already married, already have children, and you are teaching those children your world.
But that world is the by-product of the massive changes made to the world before it. And you must know, as critically as you know reading, writing and arithmetic, what those changes were and what they have wrought, because that is the only way to repair what was lost, and prevent that loss from repeating itself.
As a famous song once suggested, teach your children well, and their father's hell will slowly go by.
Remnants of war
This is that hell. Twenty-five years ago, on a crystal blue September morning, four commercial airplanes were hijacked by 19 men, and within 76 minutes, all four had crashed, two into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, one into the Pentagon near Washington, DC, and one into a field in Pennsylvania.
Seventy-six minutes. That’s all it took. Seventy-six, a number we often associate with America’s revolution, was now part of another revolution.
And another war.
We called it the War on Terror, and it went on for decades and in some ways goes on to this day.
It has cost nearly a million lives, including the nearly 3,000 lost in the Sept. 11 attacks, the more than 7,000 U.S. military lost fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and other hotspots, the 8,000 or so U.S contractors lost in those same places, and the hundreds of thousands of foreign combatants and civilians whose lives were snuffed out by everything from bombs to bullets to falling buildings to accidents.
All of it started, like the single bullet that killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and sparked World War I, with that September morning 25 years ago today, and 19 evil men who boarded airplanes with boxcutters, knives and chemical sprays.
You may read that, young people, and think, “How stupid. Who would let people get on planes with that stuff?”
And you are beginning to understand the world before and after.
The way it was
Did you know that on the night before America changed forever, Ernie Harwell broadcast a Tigers game at Comerica Park, gasoline cost $1.53 per gallon, the most popular TV show was “Friends,” and if you had a computer, you probably ran it on Windows 98.
Oh, and no one had ever heard of an iPhone; it was still six years from being released.
On Sept. 10, 2001, you could still go to an airport gate and greet your loved ones.
Security checks were perfunctory. You were allowed to bring knives, scissors even baseball bats on board with you, and you could pack your carry-on with giant shampoos and bottles of water.
Before those airplanes took down the tallest buildings in New York, there was no Department of Homeland Security, no TSA, no ICE. There was no such thing as the Patriot Act.
If you want to know, young people, why you have to empty your bags at a football game or a rock concert, you can trace it back to 9/11. If you want to comprehend why we are currently debating things like surveillance cameras at traffic stops and federal officers in civilian settings, you can trace it back to 9/11. If you want to know why it seems so easy to blame foreigners for our woes, to split the world into “us” and “them,” you can trace that back to 9/11 as well.
What died that day was more than the stockbrokers, insurance agents, tourists, first responders and countless others killed in the terror attacks, what died was our sense of security. And as a result, what began to die was trust, privacy, even our idea of what was a civil right.
So today, when we willingly give up our most private information, our faces, even our eyeballs, it goes back to 9/11. When the government detains noncitizens or collects Americans’ phone records, it goes back to 9/11. Our current phobia about illegal immigration, and our president’s ability to stoke fears about our borders goes back to 9/11.
We are a much different nation that we were the day before those attacks.
But we are also much different than we were the day after.
United we stood
You should know, young people, that as the smoke still wafted over New York City, the French newspaper Le Monde ran the headline “We are all Americans.” Buckingham Palace played “The Star-Spangled Banner” during its changing of the guard. Iran and Cuba both condemned the terror attacks. Over 200,000 people marched in Berlin in solidarity with the U.S. Canada took in thousands of stranded American passengers (later beautifully portrayed by the musical “Come From Away”). And NATO unanimously invoked Article 5 stating an attack on one member is an attack on all, the only time in history it has ever done so.
Compare that to today, when we have, in some way, alienated all of those countries. The solidarity we had with the world may seem impossible to you now, but it isn’t, and many of us are old enough to remember how comforting it felt.
We are old enough to remember how 4 out of 5 Americans flew a flag after the 9/11 attacks. How our president at the time, George W. Bush, reached a 90% approval rating. How scores of young men and women signed up for military service. How long lines formed around blood donation centers.
You should know, young people, that such national unity can exist, but it usually only follows something awful. And sadly, it fades.
On the evening of 9/11, a group of 150 lawmakers, Democrats and Republicans, sang an impromptu version of “God Bless America” on the steps on the Capitol. It seems impossible to imagine that happening today. Patriotism has given way to cynicism. A love of U.S. democracy is being challenged by a burgeoning embrace of socialism. A collective belief in fighting the enemy has fractured into finger-pointing over who the enemy is.
Things have changed. Certain muscles have remained tense. Certain muscles have relaxed. New York City now has a Muslim mayor. That is impossible to imagine 25 years ago. President Donald Trump hosted Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince at the White house last year. That is impossible to imagine 25 years ago (15 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were from Saudi Arabia.)
But what is not impossible to imagine is another terrorist attack. It is true that that our massive response to 9/11 has been successful in taking down Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, hobbling the al-Qaida and ISIS networks, and foiling countless other terror plots, some that we know of — like Richard Reid’s airplane shoe-bombing attempt — and many that we don’t.
We should also note that our current war with Iran is, in many ways, just a continuation of what sparked 9/11. Twenty-five years after Bin Laden bragged that America had just been “hit by God,” we have Iran’s Supreme Leader saying U.S. forces belong at the bottom of the sea.
Twenty-five years after Bin Laden called the existence of Israel one of the world’s “great crimes,” we have leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah extolling the same idea.
America was hated by certain factions then; it remains hated by those factions today. Which is why, should another attack like 9/11 occur on our shores, the one huge undeniable difference will be a lack of surprise.
We were shocked back then. We would not be today. The loss of innocence we endured, young people, has been passed on to you in so many forms; from security checks to federal agencies to angry online vitriol.
I ended my column the day after the world changed 25 years ago this way:
“We have been lucky in America. We have lived pleasantly ignorant of the terror that threatens other nations every day. No more. That smoke was our innocence. That smoke was our peace of mind. It is disappearing now in the bloody skies above New York and Washington and Pennsylvania.
“This is our new war, one that doesn’t follow any old rules, except the one that says in war people die, and no one is ever the same once they start.”
We are not the same. You, young people, need to know that. You need to know how we once were and how we have changed, in order to know what our nation is capable of, for better and for worse.
Teach your children well. We owe you that much, just as you owe them.
Contact Mitch Albom: malbom@freepress.com. Check out the latest updates on his charities, books and events at MitchAlbom.com. Follow @mitchalbom on x.com.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Mitch Albom: After 25 years, what has changed and what has not
