Six Years On

A poll was out on Monday from Zogby that showed a majority of Americans polled — 87% of them, to be exact — see 9/11 as the "most significant historical event of their lives." At first I was inclined to think the poll was skewed, or that it wasn't true, but then I remembered a conversation I had with my brother recently, in which I said the same thing: that no single event in my life, outside of the close personal personals like getting married, has been more formative than 9/11.

Six years ago today, I was a music major at the University of North Texas. That was what I did before I got into politics: I wrote music. I spent time at Berklee College of Music in Boston before coming home to Texas, and between coming home and 9/11, I had gotten engaged, taught myself to program a little bit, and was making webpages for food while I went to college and learned about orchestration and film scoring. Back when I had it all figured out, film scoring was my career of choice. What better life, I thought, than getting to write big orchestral scores for movies or TV shows?

I was politically engaged back then, as well. I read the paper, watched the news, worried in a very generalized way about the Middle East, and voted. I was not Involved with a capital I like I am now, but I like to think I was at least partially informed and aware of world events.

Since returning to UNT, I had even picked up a minor in political science because I was interested in it and enjoyed reading and talking about politics. I would often make the argument to my less-engaged friends that politics mattered, and that who was in control in the government had a big effect on their lives. I would say these things also in a generalized way, as if I knew it must be true, but I had trouble backing these assertions up with literal, tangible examples. So: politics was interesting, but music was my future; I was fully engrossed in tending to the serious business of art.

Then, six years ago today, we all woke up and saw the unthinkable unfolding, either on television or in real life. Somehow, by noon, my house had become a gathering place for my friends and what family members we could get in touch with. Rumors and scares were abundant that day — someone heard something was happening in Los Angeles, the FAA was reporting a plane was lost in the south and headed for Dallas. Everyone's imagination was in overdrive, and rightly so: what we saw on TV felt like what should have been a worst-case scenario, but who knew what was coming next? How safe, or not, were we?

I remember one moment very clearly. After the collapse of the first tower, everyone in my living room became very quiet. The nervous chatter and postulations died down and we just watched for what seemed like forever, in silence. Then my best friend Dave, who I've known since we were both about 11 or so, turned to me and said, "Why can't people just leave each other alone?"

It was a very simple question, and I didn't offer an answer because I didn't have one. To this day I feel like he was asking, in a very honest way, a question that should be answered. It is a question I would also very much like an answer to, and that's probably why I've ended up where I am today.

I moved back to Boston for a while, and started writing about politics. I moved back to Texas (again) and switched majors to political science. I graduated from UNT. I immediately went into graduate work focused on terrorism and political risk. I have worked in the field of political risk and, as far as electoral politics goes, I have obviously gotten much more involved. It was all well and good for me to tell my friends and neighbors that politics mattered, and that who controlled government impacted their lives, even though I had trouble pointing to ways politics impacted their lives in a way they could relate to. In the six years since 9/11, my generation and the ones immediately surrounding it have been taught that lesson in a very real way, and with examples that everyone can relate to.

It would amount to generational arrogance to say that 9/11 was more significant than any other pivotal event in history. Just in the 20th century, the world changed so much and so quickly that pinpointing any single moment as the linchpin upon which American history turns is a fool's errand: World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Vietnam, JFK's assassination, man's first steps on the moon, and many other points along the continuum were all incredibly influential. They are all markers that delineate the end of something and the beginning of something else.

9/11, however, brought the realities of politics, international affairs, and terrorism home in a very visceral, immediate way, and it did so for everyone, especially my generation. We were too young to really understand what the end of the Cold War meant. The most significant military engagement we'd experienced as a generation was the first Gulf War. Transnational terrorism was largely something we saw in movies, and it was usually the IRA, as the age of Chuck Norris battling hijackers from the Middle East had been deeply rooted too far back in the 80's for us to notice, unless we saw it on cable in the early 90's. In many ways, 9/11 was my generation's introduction to the world at large, a world that had sharp teeth and could bite.

This may not be universally true, but everyone I know experienced some significant change in their lives stemming from 9/11, whether they re-evaluated who they were and what they were doing with their lives, or they went to war, or their sons or daughters went to war, or they just sat up and paid attention for the first time in a while. Every time you fly, your life is affected by 9/11. Every time you use your passport (or you have to wait a very long time to get one), you are experiencing at least an indirect affect from 9/11. And I'm willing to bet that every time you hear political messages around election time, you're likely to hear subjects and policies being discussed that you likely wouldn't have if not for 9/11.

All of us have seen many other cases since 9/11 in which we learned that who governs matters, and those have usually not turned out well. Maybe it is the information age we live in and the accompanying constant barrage of information, but sometimes I feel like 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and the Iraq War must be too much for us to take in such a relatively small span of time. For the most part, America proves me wrong on that score. People keep getting up and going to work. Kids and adults alike keep going to school. People keep getting married and moving forward. People keep going. And I think, in an age where it would be very easy to get cynical and throw your hands up and say "I quit," people keep looking for something more than the forces that act upon them, sometimes seemingly without mercy or consideration. In the years since 9/11 and in spite of every other ill that has befallen this country, people keep going, and now I think they do a little more talking and listening and reading and considering.

These days I worry about the Middle East in a much more specific way than I once did. I realize many things about politics and government that would have been handy knowledge to have for analytical purposes on the morning of 9/11, that would have helped me comprehend what I was seeing, or at the very least given me some sort of geopolitical context for it. It would not, however, prepare me any better to answer Dave's question, "Why can't people just leave each other alone?" I still don't have an answer for that. I may never figure it out, and it is likely to take plenty of people that are far smarter than I am to nail it down. I am encouraged, though, that the question is being asked, and that plenty of people are working on the answer in their own way.