It’s so interesting how does one photo can inspire so many thoughts. 9/11 25 years later and we’ve been doing some thinking so buckle up for a long post….
So here we are, the big one, a quarter of a century since 9/11 occurred.
Over the past 25 years, we have delved into a number of annual 9/11 stories. We talked about conspiracy theories, we talked about pop culture at the time of 9/11, we spoke about forgotten history, and we even delved into advertising that was on television right before networks switched over to the live coverage that changed everything.
Being 25 years in, we also think that this will be our last post about 9/11. No, not everything that has been said is a finality of it all, and as times change and emotions change, people have a renewed sense of history and perspective. But this year, in the spirit of change, we’re going to discuss how the world that many of us grew up in no longer exists and the planet that many were born into may have never existed at all.
There’s a famous photograph that was spread around the internet many years ago and continues to be spread. Every now and then it will pop up on a social media site and you may just think it’s AI, but we can attest to the fact that this image was around before artificial intelligence was busy creating things that also don’t exist in real life.
The simple image of a young girl standing in front of the Twin Towers, with a couple on the ground in the background and a beautiful blue sky, is a quaint, picturesque moment that will live forever in a shroud of mystery.
You see, despite this being posted, no one really knows who this is. It seems like it’s a real picture. It would appear to be an actual image taken at some point, perhaps in the 1970s, ‘80s or ’90s, but no one really knows who it is, when it was taken or how it got put out onto the World Wide Web. But it did, and it’s a stark reminder of a world that existed prior to September 11, 2001.
A lot of people who are observing 9/11 were not alive on 9/11 or before. We’re 25 years into this, so many people who are learning about it have no connection to the world that existed prior to it happening. And then there’s a large group of people who do remember the feelings before, the reality before, the way the world worked, the mechanics of media and the mechanics of life.
It wasn’t just the abrupt change of 9/11 that repositioned the planet, but a series of events that took place because of it that assisted with destroying the world that existed prior to it.
Everyone goes back to the anecdotal evidence of Blockbuster Video and all the other things that nostalgic retrospectives would say we should miss, but it wasn’t always that great. Nostalgia has a funny way of lying to us and making us think that things were better than they really were, but they were different. Some liked it and some didn’t, but they were not the same as they are now.
Depending on where you live, many of the roads haven’t been paved since then and buildings haven’t been fixed since then, but those buildings are probably more vacant than they were then and those roads possibly are less used than they were in 2001.
That’s how memories work. It’s fair to say that all memories are different, and nostalgia leads us through different paths in creating or reminiscing. But it’s not just that. It’s shopping malls and stores and, for many of us, family itself.
For those who were young or middle-aged in September of 2001, how many people in your family are still alive from that era? How many people who watched the live events that day are alive now?
We are all aging. Even the Generation Z folks who think they’ll be young forever will come to find out that millennials thought that too, and so did the Generation X crowd. No one lives forever. We can try our best, but we don’t.
And the world that existed before 9/11 also didn’t live forever. As a matter of fact, it seems so distant and so gone that it almost feels like it was never even real to begin with, that it never existed and that any memories of it are false or fictitious.
But for those who still know what it was like, there’s a part of the brain that fully realizes we were immersed in a world that had things that it does not now, and the world of today has a lot more than we did then. We can debate until we’re blue in the face which one was better.
The internet of the early 2000s was far different from the one now. Phones were different, DSL was competing with broadband, and wires were still more prevalent than Wi-Fi. Everyone will have their reasons for believing one era was better than another, and that’s how generational wars subsist.
9/11 has become such a distant memory that, as time goes on, people are losing the emotions connected to what we were told to remember forever. Even the footage that plays of the second building being attacked on live news can seem almost like an inconsequential event after seeing it repeated for a quarter of a century, but it was not.
You really need to think about what was watched that day in real time and how the entire world was still tuning into the news media on television sets and using the internet to add to that. We didn’t have social media as we know it today. Instead, people relied on forums and message boards and email to spread knowledge and links. It spread slower, but it still spread, and that’s what made rumors and innuendo feel more real because you had to search and acquire that knowledge. When you found the urban legends, you weren’t quite sure how urban or how legendary they were.
One photograph that was shared hundreds of thousands of times then showed a man standing on the rooftop observation deck of the World Trade Center with a plane coming at him from behind. People believed it was real, but it wasn’t, and this was before AI. It was made with Photoshop and spread around the world twice and three times over.
Eventually, people realized it was fake, but back then we had to do more hardcore research to acquire that knowledge as to what was real and what was not real. It took a bit more time and actually talking to people on those influential forums.
And that’s why the footage, oh, the awful footage, of the planes and smoke and buildings crashing and people jumping was so haunting, because we didn’t see things like that before. At least not on television and at least not on the news.
Hollywood blockbusters gave us those images, but we didn’t think buildings could crash unless aliens attacked, like in Armageddon or Independence Day, until that day when we realized how fragile buildings were, but also how fragile life was.
You have to understand how close the world was to something that day and in the few days after, how tense the country was and how close it was to boiling over. A lot of people will theorize about who was responsible, and those theories will persist forever and intensify as time goes on. But that day, that specific moment, all we knew as a world and as a nation was that someone did it.
And when that someone did it, it was an immediate change in the basic fabric and foundation of the world we had.
For those who lived through COVID, think of it this way: telework was just a pipe dream for many until COVID happened, and now it’s more of a normalcy. Even with cutbacks on telework, it’s still being offered by many employers in a hybrid fashion.
Before 9/11, the fears and the paranoia and the hate and the negative emotions were not as persistent or prevalent. They were there, don’t get me wrong. But they got amplified beyond control, not only in the immediacy of 9/11 but in the years following.
I think it’s fair to say who we are today would never be who we would have been if the events of that day did not occur, although it’s tough to know who we would be now because, as the butterfly effect goes, several important events took place that created more events that took place that created the reality we’re in now.
So let’s go back to that image, that girl in front of the Twin Towers.
For those who lived in the ’80s or ’90s or even before that, I think they can feel that image. They know how it felt and looked and smelled, and they know how it was. That image, despite being just a picture, contains with it an emotional reaction and feeling.
It’s a fuzzy reminder of a fading world.
Twenty-five years later, perhaps that world has faded to the point of oblivion because, as more generations are born, that world really never existed for them. And as people who lived through it continue to die out, their stories about how things felt will be forgotten because the new world has no time for them.
That’s the most upsetting part of all.
