One Score and Five

Today is September 11th, 2026... twenty-five years after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Unsurprisingly, it's been a day where the news media has been looking back at the events, and stories of people who were there, or otherwise affected by the event. There is, I think, something of a temptation to make that a very expansive set, but while it may be safe to say that the population of the United States as a whole saw some impacts from the al-Qaeda attacks, I don't think that it's accurate to say that each of us, as individuals, were affected.

Perhaps because I was sleep-deprived that morning, but still needed to drive to work, it wasn't something that I could pay very much attention to when I was first hearing about it. News reports were preliminary, and so while I made the drive from Seattle to the office, things would change, but I was busy navigating the expressway.

As the full picture started to become clear, terrorism took on a new urgency in the lives of a lot of people I knew (and very many more that I didn't know). For me, though, it was simply another thing to be added to the series of vague background threats that populated my life. I was still in my early thirties, and so, statistically speaking, gun violence was still far and away the most likely thing I would have had to worry about. And while any number of people advocated for moving (Islamic) terrorism into that top spot, I was never really moved by any of it. I think that's because the threat of terrorism made a lot of people feel unsafe in a way they hadn't before, that wasn't true for me; I was already aware that an unseen clock was ticking down somewhere; it perhaps ticking slightly faster than before wasn't a cause for alarm.

Now, it's true that the new airport security measures created changes for everyone who flew, and I did get on a plane from time to time (in fact, I went on a vacation in early 2002), but it didn't take much to realize that rather than solving the problem, it just shifted it. Coming back from London in 2004, Heathrow airport struck me as a dream target for a bomber; they wouldn't have needed to get a bomb onto a plane, there was a perfectly good mass of people in the run-up to the security checkpoints, similar to what I encountered at Chicago O'Hare in 2023. The infrastructure of flying was protected, but the actual fliers themselves were exposed until they reached that secure infrastructure.

While I can be something of a suspicious person, I never harbored enough of a mistrust of government to buy into the whole Trutherism movement that sprang up around the event, even if some of the literature was moderately entertaining. I might not have a high opinion of the Powers That Be, but I tend to consider them more ineffectual than malicious. And so that was another side effect of the attacks in which I found myself an observer, rather than a participant.

In the end, while I can remember what I was doing when I heard the news, that's mainly because it happened to coincide with a change in my daily routine prescribed by my doctor. Being on the other side of the continent from the attack places a lot of literal distance between me and the events. I do think that I have more interest in how people in other parts of the world see the United States. I recall spending a fair amount of time on red, double-decker, busses explaining how Americans tend to see the world. And while the initial idea for this weblog predates the attacks, it was having conversations that entailed me laying out aspects of the United States for people not native to it that finally convinced me to launch it.

I understand that I'm a different person now than I was then, but that's mostly because it was more than two decades ago, and very little of thirty-something me has survived the intervening years. And now I live in a world in which many of the people I interact with were too young for it to be significant in their lives; that honor belongs to the SARS-2-CoV pandemic. So it seems like a big splash in a fast-flowing river; an event when it happened, but with little in the way of visible ripples this far downstream.