It seems like only yesterday. Tragedies sometimes have that effect. The good times — the triumphs, the moments of joy — aren’t forgotten, but are remembered in a smudge of memory. The great sadnesses remain, the pain persisting, the impact lingering.
So it is with Sept. 11, 2001.
It was a quarter-century in the past, almost a generation ago. It is with us still: a vivid moment of horror, followed by an aftershock that hasn’t lost its power.
In the 25 years that have passed, the United States has had a Black president and then a conservative real estate developer chief executive; universities have gone from being regarded as sacred breeding grounds of the future to being dismissed as cursed redoubts of conspiracy; the nation has been engaged in three faraway wars and basically lost them all; the two parties have careered in opposite directions, leaving a hole in the middle (and in the hearts of many of their onetime adherents); and the neighboring country that cheerfully took in our people and our aircraft in the hours after the terrorist attacks has been demonized as a calculating, selfish competitor worthy of taunts and tariffs.
A society with open doors — at its borders and also at its airports, its arenas, its synagogues, in some ways its minds — has been subjected to new security monitoring, and in many cases, those doors, and some of those minds, have closed.
An entire country was transformed in a matter of hours on a single Tuesday in September when the kids were back in school, lawmakers on Capitol Hill were readying to take up a landmark immigration bill to establish a path to citizenship for 3 million undocumented people and the Seattle Mariners were positioned to complete a record-breaking season. Secretary of State Colin Powell thought the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, a right-wing paramilitary organization, was one of the globe’s most serious threats. “I hope this will leave no doubt,” he said the day before the attacks on Washington and New York City, “that the United States considers terrorism to be unacceptable, regardless of the political or ideological purpose.”
It was so long ago that Aaron Rodgers, the old man river of pro football, was beginning a season in which he would set records for the Pleasant Valley High School Vikings in Chico, California. It was so long ago that al-Qaeda was somebody else’s problem.
Since then, security across the nation has been enhanced, perhaps to the extent that this has become something of a surveillance state. Since then, the woes of the world have come home much the way terrorism — a phenomenon that largely had occurred elsewhere, in places like Beirut, Nairobi and Dar es Salaam — came home. We believed the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 (toll: six dead) was an isolated incident, not a precedent, not a preview of something worse.
Now we know better. But we aren’t necessarily living better.
We are more suspicious. We are more wary. We are more afraid. We are, as a result of all three, maybe more realistic about the world we live in — the world that, since our founding 250 years ago, was full of dangers that never quite reached us.
We had lived between two moats, the Atlantic separating us from the ancient rivalries of old Europe, the Pacific performing the same function and insulating us from Asia’s troubles. When the world wars came, we fought them largely as “away games,” though they were hardly games. That’s why so many reached for a Pearl Harbor metaphor, matching Dec. 7, 1941, with Sept. 11, 2001. Separated by almost exactly 60 years, the “Day of Infamy” label Franklin D. Roosevelt applied when he shepherded the U.S. into World War II seemed peculiarly apt in the age of George W. Bush.
One important achievement needs to be noted and celebrated. There has not been a single mass terrorism attack on the American homeland — a phrase that used to refer to immigrants’ former homes but since 2001 has been applied to the entire United States — in the past 25 years.
There was, of course, a cost.
The daily mobility of Americans was transformed, and not only in airports, where a new agency, the Transportation Safety Administration, now has installations at even the smallest airfields, spawning a new bureaucracy and accounting for nearly 65,000 federal employees. Civil liberties have been restricted; the Patriot Act isn’t destined to be remembered as a companion to the Declaration of Independence or the Bill of Rights. Even so, even critics of the Trump administration’s Justice Department will agree with these two sentences it prepared in its statement commemorating the passage of 25 years: “The years following 9/11 … brought profound questions about how to keep Americans safe while preserving the civil liberties and constitutional rights that define us as a nation. This balance has been, and continues to be, one of the defining challenges of our time.”
Immigration attitudes and laws were transformed. “After Sept. 11, we saw a conflation of views about immigration and terrorism,” said Sarah Sherman Stokes, who teaches immigration law at Boston University. “Investigative agencies were reimagined and reorganized. There’s been the targeting of Muslim and South Asian people, and racial profiling, surveillance, deportation and detention. All that didn’t lead to a single terrorism prosecution. Yet it was a harbinger to what we see now.”
There also has been the militarization of law enforcement, the unanticipated result of a flood of money and actual war-making equipment — including tanks — to local police, resulting in an alteration in police training and tactics. At the same time, there’s fresh respect for first responders — a term seldom heard before 2001.
Five years ago, on the 20th anniversary of the attacks, an ardent defender of the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, former Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut — who a year before the destruction of the twin towers and the assault on the Pentagon had been campaigning as the Democrats’ vice presidential nominee — issued a warning. He said it was “critical that the leadership of DHS actively steer away from politics and partisanship, which obviously hurts the Department’s ability to carry out its critical missions.”
The warnings about American vulnerability to attack went unheeded. Lieberman died more than two years ago, but his 2021 warning about governmental excess needn’t go unheeded now, 25 years after the terrorist attacks that seem like they occurred only yesterday.
David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.