The Day America Changed: September 11, 2001
Although it has been 25 years, I remember the day like it was yesterday.
I was sitting in a Senior Management Team meeting when Tony Denton received a message that a plane had crashed into one of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.
My first reaction was that it must have been a terrible accident. I felt awful for the victims, but terrorism never crossed my mind. About 20 minutes later, Tony announced that a second plane had crashed into the other tower. At that point, everything changed. I realized our country was under attack.
Then we heard about the plane that crashed into the Pentagon and another that had gone down in Pennsylvania. The meeting ended as all of us sought more information.
I walked down the hallway to the admitting office. The televisions in the waiting room were on, and everyone seemed glued to the screens. I stopped and watched for a few minutes. Then, I went into management mode. I talked to the person in charge of admissions and asked her to make sure the department was prepared for the unlikely event something happened nearby or whether patients were referred to us from one of the attack sites.
Looking back, there probably wasn’t much practical reason to think that would happen. But nobody knew what was coming next. And that may be one of my strongest memories of that morning. We didn’t know whether the attacks were over.
I tried to treat the remainder of the day as normally as possible. That was impossible.
When word came that both towers had collapsed, I realized the death toll was going to be enormous. I began thinking about people I knew who worked in New York City and wondering whether they were safe.
When I got home that evening, I saw something else I will always remember.
My daughter Katy was a senior in high school and almost never watched television. She was glued to it.
For the remainder of the week, whenever Katy was home, she was watching coverage of the attacks, the rescue efforts and the country’s response.
Katy and her high school band were scheduled to perform in New York City in the spring of 2002, so what had happened suddenly seemed much closer to home. I have often wondered how much that week influenced the direction her life eventually took.
I believe the 9/11 attacks and especially the heroism of the police officers, firefighters and other first responders helped set Katy on a path toward law enforcement. She majored in criminal justice in college and has now been a federal agent for 15 years.
One day can change a country. Sometimes it can also change a life.
The Days After
The remainder of that week was emotional and gut-wrenching as we began to understand the magnitude of what had happened. But there was something else happening at the same time. The country came together.
For a brief period, the political differences that normally separated Americans seemed insignificant. People rallied around President George W. Bush, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, the police, firefighters and rescue workers. American flags seemed to appear everywhere. Strangers talked to one another. People wanted to help.
The Federal Aviation Administration grounded civilian air traffic, and major sporting events were postponed. One of the things I remember most was how eerie the world seemed during those days when airplanes weren’t flying.
At the time, we lived in the flight path of planes leaving Willow Run Airport. I hadn’t realized how accustomed I had become to hearing airplanes overhead until suddenly there weren’t any. The silence was noticeable. And unsettling.
I spent much of my spare time watching television coverage of the rescue and recovery efforts. Like millions of Americans, I was consumed by 9/11 and by how our country would respond.
Eventually, sports returned.
I remember baseball and football games being especially emotional and patriotic. When baseball returned to New York, the reaction was breathtaking. The same thing happened throughout the country. I don’t think I have ever heard the national anthem or God Bless America sung with as much emotion as they were sung during those weeks.
For a short time, we weren’t Republicans or Democrats. We weren’t conservatives or liberals. We were Americans.
Twenty-five years later, that may be one of the things I miss most about the days following September 11. Not fear, not anger and certainly not the tragedy, but the realization that, when confronted with something larger than our differences, Americans were capable of standing together.
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Twenty-Five Years Later: How 9/11 Changed America
September 11 didn’t end when the fires were extinguished and the debris was eventually removed. We have been living with its consequences ever since.
Some of the changes are so much a part of everyday life today that younger Americans may not realize there was ever another way.
Remember When You Could Walk Someone to the Airport Gate?
Before 9/11, family and friends routinely accompanied airline passengers through security and waited with them at the gate. Airport security was considerably less intrusive. Taking off your shoes wasn’t part of flying. Neither were the restrictions on liquids, full-body scanners, reinforced cockpit doors and many of the other security procedures we now take for granted. The Transportation Security Administration didn’t even exist. Congress created the TSA in November 2001, two months after the attacks.
Today, those procedures seem normal. That’s what happens after 25 years. The extraordinary becomes ordinary.
Our Government Changed
Airports weren’t the only thing that changed. The federal government underwent one of its largest reorganizations in decades.
· The Department of Homeland Security was created, bringing 22 agencies and offices together under a single Cabinet department.
· Intelligence agencies were reorganized and pushed to share information more effectively.
· Congress passed the USA PATRIOT Act only weeks after the attacks, expanding the government’s investigative and surveillance powers.
The reasons were understandable. The United States had just suffered the deadliest foreign terrorist attack on American soil, killing 2,977 people. Americans wanted their government to make sure it never happened again.
But many of the measures adopted after 9/11 also raised questions about privacy and civil liberties that we are still debating 25 years later.
The fundamental question hasn’t changed: How much freedom and privacy are we willing to give up in exchange for greater security?
We Went to War
Less than a month after September 11, the United States went to war in Afghanistan.
The immediate objective was understandable: destroy al-Qaeda and remove the Taliban government that had provided it sanctuary.
What followed became America’s longest war. Two years later, the United States invaded Iraq.
Twenty years after American troops entered Afghanistan, they left and the Taliban returned to power.
The human and financial cost of the post-9/11 wars has been enormous.
Thousands of American service members died. Many more returned home carrying physical and psychological wounds. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed directly in the wars overseas, and millions were displaced.
Brown University’s Costs of War project estimates that the United States spent or obligated more than $8 trillion through 2021 on post-9/11 wars and related costs.
We should always honor the extraordinary service and sacrifice of the Americans who served.
But 25 years later, we should also be willing to ask a difficult question: Did every decision we made in response to September 11 make us safer?
Fear Changed Us
Maybe the biggest changes are the hardest ones to measure.
Before 9/11, terrorism seemed distant to many Americans. It was something that happened somewhere else. September 11 destroyed that illusion.
Suddenly we thought differently about airplanes, bridges, tunnels, stadiums, government buildings and unattended packages. We learned phrases like homeland security and terror alert. Security became part of everyday American life.
Fear has consequences
Muslim Americans, Arab Americans and people perceived to be Middle Eastern sometimes became targets of suspicion, discrimination and harassment.
Fear can also cause us to treat innocent people as though they are responsible for the actions of others.
Are We Safer?
I think the answer has to be yes—in some important ways. We haven’t experienced another foreign terrorist attack approaching the scale of September 11. Airplanes are more difficult to hijack, intelligence agencies communicate differently, airport security is far more sophisticated, and the government devotes enormous resources to identifying terrorist threats before they reach us.
But greater security came at a price: two decades of war, trillions of dollars, expanded government surveillance and a greater willingness to allow fear to influence public policy.
And Then There Was Unity
There is one other change I’ve been thinking about as this anniversary approaches. It isn’t something 9/11 caused. It’s something that happened afterward.
Twenty-five years ago, Americans who disagreed about almost everything discovered that they still had something important in common. Their country.
Unfortunately, that unity didn’t last. Maybe unity created by tragedy never does. Today, we disagree over politics, immigration, elections, race, the media, foreign policy and sometimes even basic facts. We too often treat Americans who disagree with us politically not simply as people who are wrong, but as enemies. I don’t want another national tragedy to remind us that we belong to the same country. Surely there must be a better way.
For a Generation 9/11 is Only History
Twenty-five years later there is now an entire generation of Americans who weren’t alive on September 11, 2001. For them, 9/11 is history.
For those of us who watched it happen, it is something different. It is part of who we are. It is sitting in that meeting when the first report arrived, realizing after the second airplane hit that we were under attack, the people standing silently in the hospital admitting area staring at the television, Katy sitting in front of our television at home, airplanes disappearing from the sky for four days, Americans coming together.
Today we should remember:
· the 2,977 people who went about an ordinary Tuesday morning and never came home.
· the firefighters, police officers and other first responders who ran toward danger while everyone else was trying to escape it.
· the passengers and crew of Flight 93 who fought back.
· the Americans who served our country in the 25 years that followed.
But remembering should involve more than looking backward.
September 11 taught us that America wasn’t invulnerable. It also taught us that how a country responds to fear can change it almost as profoundly as the event that frightened it.
Perhaps the challenge for the next 25 years is figuring out how to keep ourselves safe without allowing fear—or our differences—to define who we are.
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What Is a Life Worth?
I read a fascinating article in The New York Times this morning about another part of the 9/11 story I hadn’t thought much about.
How do you put a dollar value on a human life?
That was the almost impossible assignment given to Kenneth Feinberg after September 11.
Congress created the September 11 Victim Compensation Fund less than two weeks after the attacks. Feinberg, a lawyer and experienced mediator, was selected to administer it. The idea was unusual.
Instead of forcing victims and their families into years of litigation, the federal government would compensate them. In return, those accepting compensation generally gave up their right to sue the airlines and others involved.
Feinberg recalled one grieving husband essentially telling him that the money didn’t matter. What he really wanted was his wife back.
The compensation formula considered such things as what the victim probably would have earned over a lifetime. A highly paid Wall Street executive might receive considerably more than a firefighter, restaurant worker or administrative assistant.
Was the executive’s life really worth more? Of course not. But how else do you calculate the economic loss suffered by a family?
Feinberg discovered very quickly that this wasn’t simply a financial or legal problem. It was a human one.
He met personally with hundreds of grieving families. Some were angry. Some couldn’t understand why the government was talking about money when they hadn’t even recovered the body of their husband, wife, son or daughter.
Feinberg recalled one husband reacting to a multimillion-dollar award with essentially a much different proposition: Forget the money. Give me my wife back. There was no answer to that.
Eventually, Feinberg says he learned one of the most important lessons of the entire experience. He needed to talk less. And listen more.
Ultimately, the fund distributed more than $7 billion, and about 97 percent of the families of those killed participated.
But 25 years later, Feinberg says the experience changed him permanently. After spending nearly three years listening to people whose lives had been destroyed by something completely unexpected, he became acutely aware of how unpredictable life really is.
Someone stops for another cup of coffee and arrives at work a few minutes later. Someone else doesn’t. One lives. One dies.
We spend an enormous amount of time planning tomorrow, next month and next year as though those days have somehow been guaranteed to us.
They haven’t. That may be one more lesson worth remembering on this 25th anniversary.
Money can compensate for lost income. It cannot compensate for a lost life. And perhaps Feinberg’s experience leaves us with an even simpler lesson:
Listen more. Appreciate the people around you. And don’t assume tomorrow is guaranteed.
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Quote of the Day: “No day shall erase you from the memory of time.” — Virgil
Those words are inscribed at the 9/11 Memorial Museum.
Orchid of the Day: The first responders of September 11, 2001. Firefighters, police officers, emergency medical personnel and countless ordinary people ran toward danger when every instinct must have told them to run away.
Three hundred forty-three FDNY firefighters, 37 Port Authority police officers and 23 NYPD officers were among those killed that day. Twenty-five years later, their courage remains one of the most enduring memories of September 11.
Second Orchid of the Day: Kenneth Feinberg, who took on the nearly impossible job of administering the September 11 Victim Compensation Fund. Feinberg spent nearly three years listening to grieving families while trying to determine fair compensation for losses that couldn’t possibly be measured in dollars. The fund ultimately distributed more than $7 billion. Perhaps his greatest accomplishment wasn’t figuring out what to say to those families. It was learning when to stop talking and simply listen.
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Onion of the Day: Al-Qaeda and the 19 terrorists who carried out the September 11 attacks. They murdered 2,977 innocent people from more than 90 countries.
They wanted to terrorize America. They succeeded in changing our country. But they failed in their larger objective. Twenty-five years later, Americans are still here—and we are still remembering those they tried to erase.
Questions of the Day: Twenty-five years after 9/11, are Americans safer because of the changes we made—or did we surrender more privacy and freedom than was necessary?
And perhaps the harder question: What happened to the sense of national unity we experienced after September 11, and is it possible to find some of it again without first experiencing another tragedy?
Lyrics of the Day: “Come on up for the rising.”
If you know the song and artist, please leave your answer in the comments below.
Answer to Wednesday’s Lyrics of the Day
“The Times They Are A-Changin’” — Bob Dylan
Video of the Day: September 11, 2001
https://apnews.com/video/911-how-the-day-unfolded-a53cf4e5d42f4174b0812f3e175757e8?user_email=66638a9f5fcf9fe898cb0cce378694af7571c36f91c178717622377c0906f3e9&utm_medium=Morning_Wire&utm_source=Sailthru_AP&utm_campaign=Morning%20Wire%20Friday%2C%20Sep%2011%2C%202026&utm_term=Morning%20Wire%20Subscribers
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Great job writing in rememberence of 9/11