Every year on September 11, I actually spend more time thinking about September 10.
I hope I never forget what it felt like to be alive on September 10, 2001. I was probably naive, but the world seemed like it was twisting in the right direction. 1/
I hope I never forget what it felt like to be alive on September 10, 2001. I was probably naive, but the world seemed like it was twisting in the right direction. 1/
Having grown up in the death rattle of the Cold War, the danger felt, well, in the past. Back there with World War II, something to ask Mom and Dad about. It just felt, well, optimistic. In a grand sense.
If anything, in retrospect, it was a little boring. In a good way. I remember thinking foolish things like "Will the Gulf War and Internet will be the Serious Things that happen in my lifetime?" and "man, this Bush stem cells speech is a defining moment!" Oh to be so bored.
It's startling to think there are millions of Americans---adult, voting age Americans ---who have no capacity to recall that feeling. And it gives me a better sense of how human institutions, large and small, change. Not for better or worse, just forever.
You can't return to a normal you can't remember, and I'm not sure I could even explain in words to a teenager what that normal felt like.
And all at once, I feel more like a conservative and more like a liberal at the same time. It's disorienting, but perhaps more real. The ship had been sailing all along, we just didn't know it until we woke up that morning.
For me, the realization was that maybe September 10 was part of the exceptional period, not normal at all. And we have now returned to the normal, where romanticism is ignorant, and optimism is real but always bounded.
