9/11 looks different for my generation. Here’s how

The first time I genuinely heard about 9/11 was from watching the American sitcom Family Guy. But long before I understood what it was – and I’m not sure I ever fully will understand – I had already heard the words Taliban, Osama, and eventually ISIS.

There are so many generational divides that 9/11 created. It is not just, “Did you see it happen live?” it is also about what came to define the world around you afterwards. Take Tony Blair – many people my age struggle to understand how he could ever have been seen as massively popular, because their opinion of him is shaped by the Iraq War. 

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BORN IN THE FIRES OF 9/11

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There are also some much uglier generational divides. Some, having grown up watching Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria being drone-striked on the news, seem to look retrospectively at the attacks and conclude that America deserved them. It obviously didn’t, but it doesn’t change the fact that it is for, say, a 21-year-old, a piece of history: something to be debated rather than a tragic event in the not so distant past.

There is an X account called 25 Years Ago Live, which posts news coverage as if it were happening on that exact day twenty five years ago. Earlier this week, the owner broke the fourth wall to explain how they would handle their coverage of 9/11, including that they would not be engaging with conspiracy theories. This led to genuine outrage from some of its predominantly Gen Z followers, who had been very excited to experience the events of the day live, complaining that the owner had “ruined the immersion”.

It is not necessarily that we do not care about 9/11. It is that we have encountered it through the strange flattening effect of the internet: real footage of the attacks, endlessly available on social media; conspiracy theories dressed up as memes (“Bush did 9/11”, “Jet fuel can’t melt steel beams”) ; and even a grotesque parody of “Thrift Shop” – “I’m gonna fly some planes” instead of “I’m gonna pop some tags” – with tens of millions of views on YouTube.

So we don’t give 9/11 the reverence it deserves. We also get spoken to as though we will never understand the terror it imbued, and perhaps that is correct. But we also came of age during a much slower, more stretched-out terror.

I still remember discussing which UK city we thought ISIS would attack next in my primary school playground. I was the same age as the girls who died in the Manchester Arena bombing. In early secondary school, it wasn’t particularly uncommon for a phone to be shoved in front of your face showing an ISIS beheading video before 9am. 

Once, I visited my sister in London just after a terrorist attack. I can’t even remember which one now. My mum put cash into her hand with strict instructions: do not take the bus, do not take the Tube, you have to get a cab. We got the bus anyway. I asked my sister why we weren’t allowed to. She just looked at me and said: “Terrorism.”

And perhaps most interestingly, as an example of an actual hard generational divide, my boyfriend was born in 1999. About a decade after leaving his old secondary school, he went back to teach there. He could not believe that children were regularly trained in lockdown drills.

I couldn’t believe his surprise. I began school in 2015, and by 2017 – the year of five major terrorist attacks in the UK – we were drilling on what to do if an intruder entered the school with a knife, gun or bomb.

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People talk about Covid as Gen Z’s defining historical moment, and perhaps one day we will talk about it in the same way that older generations do about 9/11. There will be a before and an after, and eventually there will be children, and then adults, at whom we will balk for not knowing what the world was like before the pandemic.

For those who lived through 9/11, it was a rupture of the most monumental size: the day the world changed, and perhaps the most terrifying day in their collective memory. For those of us born afterwards, it is the beginning of the world we know – the first chapter, rather than the moment the previous one ended. 

We inherited the fear, the wars, and the terrorism, but not the shock. Perhaps that is why reactions to it can sometimes seem so glib, or even offensive, to those who remember. How do we properly mourn a world we never knew existed?