Sunday will mark the ten year anniversary of the Al Qaeda September 11th attacks on Washington D.C. and New York City. While this event has been a defining moment for a generation that came of age during the Clinton years, in the same way that the Kennedy assassination was to their parents; it is also a recognizable moment when this country violently lost its innocence.
We, as a nation, used to believe that war against this country would be conducted by nation states who would use conventional arms against us. We were confident that no one would ever attack us on our soil because we had the ability to make a parking lot of any country that did so. But on September 11th, we discovered that a single ideologue also has the capacity to conduct war on us as well. We discovered that a person who is prepared to die for a cause, regardless of how ill-logical that cause might seem to us, had the capacity through the access to technology to inflict a scale of damage that previously only nations could impose upon each other.
We used to believe that our oceans and superior technology would protect us from any attack. On that day we discovered that it wouldn’t – that it couldn’t protect us, from an enemy who measured success based on how many lives he took and how much fear he could generate as he died for his cause.
The world is much different now than it was ten years ago. We, as Americans, have grown cynical and distrustful of the rest of the planet. While we’ve avenged those who lost their lives in the September attacks at the cost of $1.2 trillion dollars and 40,000 dead and wounded (includes both Afghanistan and Iraq), we don’t feel any safer.
That’s because we’re not.
We will never be able to return to the comfort level of the world we knew on September 10,2001.
September 11th, 2001 is a day that will always be a touchstone for this nation, the same way December 7th, 1941 or November 22, 1963 are. It is a signpost we hope to never see again.