20 years ago today

There’s only been one day in my life when I could get a phone call, and without any context aside from being in America, know exactly what it was about when I heard the other person’s first sentence:

“Do you see what’s happening?”

That’s what my mom said to me at the beginning of her call, when I was in my apartment in college at age 20. For me, that one sentence marked an invisible dividing line between every day before then and everything afterwards.

20 years ago today, on September 11, 2001, starting at 8:46 a.m., almost 3,000 people died in terrorist attacks against America.

We say “3,000 deaths” as a shorthand for “all the harm caused by the attacks,” but the harm was even greater than that. There were toxic environmental effects in Manhattan, which have also killed people. There was enormous economic loss (for instance, the cost to New York City in just the first month after the attacks was over $100 billion). Economic loss can also kill people, but in long-term ways that are hard to see. And there were far more than 3,000 deaths in war.

Of course, you can say America shouldn’t have gone to war, but back then it didn’t feel like we were starting a war in Afghanistan. We felt like we were trying to end a war that was started against us. It’s hard to tell a country that’s just been attacked with intent to cause maximum death and destruction and chaos: you’re not allowed to fight back, no matter how much you try to minimize harm and rebuild places you damage.

We should’ve done a lot of things differently. But after September 11, we couldn’t have just done nothing. That doesn’t mean the something we did was always right. No matter how much we’ve gotten it wrong in the past, we need to keep trying to keep our country safe. We need to remember our history without letting it define us.

(Photo of September 11 memorial by Denise Gould. I got this photo from pingnews, which got it from the U.S. Department of Defense photo collection.)