One Attack, Many Americas: Why 9/11 Still Feels Different 25 Years Later
NEW YORK (AP) — On a cloudless September morning in 2001, 19 men hijacked four passenger jets and turned them into weapons. Two planes struck the World Trade Center in New York, a third hit the Pentagon, and a fourth crashed into a Pennsylvania field after passengers fought back. By day’s end, nearly 3,000 people were dead.
The shock reached far beyond the crash sites. Millions who had never set foot in New York or Washington watched the smoke and ashes on television and felt the country change beneath them. People stood in line to give blood, put flags on their porches, and searched for words in churches, parks and parking lots. For a moment, grief had a national address.
Twenty-five years later, that single national address is harder to find. The attacks and their aftermath have come to mean different things to different Americans, shaped by what happened to them, what the government did next and when they were born.
“The same event, whether it’s a disaster or a shock or even the recovery process, is completely different depending on your network,” said Daniel Aldrich, a professor at Northeastern University who studies communities and resilience.
Those networks are many. They include the families who lost parents, spouses and children; rescue and cleanup workers who spent months in the ruins at ground zero; military veterans who signed up after the attacks; airline and tourism workers who lost jobs in the industry’s collapse; and Muslim, Sikh, Arab and South Asian communities that were suddenly seen by some as threats.
The same layers can exist under one roof. Jenna McPartland, a chef and restaurant owner in Fairfield, Connecticut, was pregnant with her first child when her husband, Ariel Jacobs, was killed at the World Trade Center. Gabriel was born days later. McPartland remarried and had two younger sons, and she has been stepmother to two teenagers for the last decade. Her children know Sept. 11 as part of the family story, but not all of them carry it in the same way.
Her middle son wrote his college application essay about being part of a 9/11 family without being the central 9/11 figure in it. He also wrote that he would not exist if his older brother’s dad had not died. “They all acknowledge it in different ways, they feel it in different ways, they sense it in their lives in different ways,” McPartland said.
Government choices after Sept. 11 made those differences more pronounced. Within weeks, Congress enacted a broad national security agenda and U.S. forces were on the ground in Afghanistan. The Department of Homeland Security was created, the Transportation Security Administration took over airport checkpoints, and the intelligence community was given new powers to track, detain and deport people.
In 2002, the federal government implemented the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, which required non-U.S. citizen men over 16 from 25 mostly Muslim-majority countries to register at ports of entry and immigration offices. Critics called the program racial and religious profiling, and it was eventually dismantled. But much of the architecture it represented remained, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency that, under the Trump administration, has become the public face of aggressive and highly controversial immigration crackdowns.
“The idea that we need to do everything possible to protect ourselves from whatever this threat is — an amorphous threat — has become totally normalized,” said Jayesh Rathod, a professor at Georgetown Law.
For many Americans who looked like the enemy in official narratives, the suspicion was not abstract. Four days after the attacks, Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh gas station owner in Mesa, Arizona, was shot and killed by a man who said he was avenging 9/11 and assumed Sodhi was Arab. He was among the hate-crime victims in the wave of violence that followed the attacks.
Vida Lashgari, 21, raised in California by a Mexican mother and a Persian father, said she grew up learning how 9/11 changed the daily lives of Middle Easterners, Sikhs and brown people across the country. Her father, she said, became far more conscious of his appearance, his accent and the way he dressed in the United States. “That kind of fear, I think, has carried throughout the Middle Eastern community since then,” she said.
For Lashgari, who was born after 2001, the attacks have always been history, not memory. The closest she has come to understanding the breach between before and after, she said, was the COVID-19 pandemic. “The pandemic shook up so many lives, especially in my generation, who had not experienced some sort of drastic change like that,” Lashgari said. “It gave me perspective that there are some things that we can’t be protected from.”
Time alone explains part of the divide. Tens of millions of Americans have been born since the towers fell; for them, 9/11 is a lesson in school, as distant as Pearl Harbor unless something connects it to them.
Amy Sodaro, a sociology professor at the Borough of Manhattan Community College who studies memorials, remembers believing that 9/11 would define her life and the society around her. It did, she said, but not in the simple way she expected. New wars, political upheaval and other crises kept changing the frame. “These other geopolitical events and changes to our world have changed the face of 9/11 in historical memory at the collective level — and I think also at the level of individuals,” Sodaro said.
Maybe that is inevitable. A national trauma large enough to hold everyone will not hold everyone in the same place. Twenty-five years later, Sept. 11 is still a date that binds the country. It just does not bind it together the way it once seemed to.