Thread by @pashulman

I've been off the internet most of the day but there's still a bit of time to recount my incredibly banal where-I-was-on-9/11 story.

I had just started grad school. Between the time I'd left home to walk across campus to my office, the first plane had struck the North Tower. A large group of students, mostly management students, were already clustered around a lobby tv watching the news.

I truthfully cannot remember if I saw the second tower get struck or if it had also just happened. I've seen so many videos everything blurs together. Eventually I pulled myself away to get to my actual office, where I found fellow shocked students packing up to head home.

I eventually left, too. One thing remembrances often leave out is that so many people ran to the internet and their cell phones that it was very hard to get through to anybody or anything.

I was in Cambridge, just miles from where two of the four planes had taken off. Of course, airspace was quickly shut down across the country for several days. The only planes in the sky were Air Force fighter jets, which was very disconcerting.

Eventually, I got through to my grandmother, and I asked her what the actual moment of learning about Pearl Harbor was like. It was a comparison that millions of people were making. We talked about it for a while.

But here's the thing. It turns out it was a terrible historical analogy. Just world-historically bad. There were a million salient differences between Pearl Harbor and the attacks of 9/11, and yet people around the country–though fewer around the world–leaned into the analogy.

The analogy is so bad John Dower wrote a whole book tearing it apart. amazon.com/Cultures-War-P…

Most people who cited it probably did so–as I naively had–in an earnest effort to make sense of terrible tragedy.

And yet. It became the basis for several years of what became disastrous American foreign policy.

It was pushed by politicians, by journalists, by pundits.

The people who pointed out why it made little sense were–for several years–marginalize, mocked, and ignored. Some were harassed. But they were right.

Our stories about the past matter because we use them to make sense of our presents and make choices about our futures. And misguided stories can cause terrible damage.

All the more so when fueled by the most powerful military in the history of the planet in a country seeking retribution for a terrible attack.

On this 9/11 anniversary, I remember the thousands of lives lost that day, the many more over the two decades that followed because of choices made in the terrified weeks after, and those still struggling with loss.

And may we all remember to be careful about those promoting easy parallels between the past and the present. The world is a complicated place.