September 11th forms a defining moment in the memories of many Americans; it is, for one generation, what Pearl Harbor, or President Kennedy's assassination, might be for others.
But time passes, and there are now millions of us who are too young to remember the event, or who were even born after it occurred. Indeed, I am sure that some of my law school classmates were born after it occurred. I was three—alive, yes, but too young to notice. I remember first hearing about it three years later, in 2004. My German grandparents had a poster of New York City in an upstairs bedroom. Someone—my mom, I think—told me that the two large towers in the middle no longer stood, having been struck by terrorists with an airplane. I thought that sounded rather bizarre and rather bad, but had no further opinion. (Oddly, I do remember the beginning of the Iraq War, a year earlier, but I don't think I knew it had any connection to a terrorist attack.)
What should the attack mean for those Americans who, like me, were too young to notice? I think it is impossible to recreate whatever meaning it held for our elders. An American not born at Kennedy's assassination will never think of that killing in the same way as someone who experienced it; Pearl Harbor held a special meaning for its own generation. Every age will have its own defining moments and political shocks. For some youngsters, that might be Covid; for others, the invasion of Ukraine; for many, I suppose, some as-yet-to-undetermined calamity, like a war with China. Hopefully it's not so grim, but history surprises.
But this much we must recall, in preparation for what may yet come: real evil exists. It is very easy to forget this. Even the poorest and most forsaken Americans live in a world of unfathomable prosperity and peace. Struggles for better wages or working conditions or a cleaner environment or lower crime rates or better education or even a more moral society are in some sense trivial in comparison to the depths of human evil joined with human power. And our notions of "evil" are paltry in the great span of human history. My own university was founded in 1636. In that year a terrible war raged in Europe, one that killed a third of Germany's population (a considerably higher proportion than World War II). I suppose some students, rather like me, strolled the same grounds at that time. Viewed that way, it seems rather recent. That sort of thing could happen again.
But the other lesson is more hopeful: heroism exists, too. There are the many first responders, and of course the passengers of Flight 93. Today I was even reading about Rick Rescorla, the head of security for Morgan Stanley in the South Tower, who expected such an attack, developed procedures for it, and saved thousands of lives, before rushing back in to save more, and giving up his own. There were even dozens of police dogs (one of whom died).
And all these things are happening today in other places—in Verbove and Klishchiivka in Ukraine (where the heaviest fighting now rages), in Ngorno-Karabakh, in Xinjiang, and elsewhere. There is unspeakable evil and unimaginable sacrifice. It is better by far never to experience these things. But some people do, and they are not very different from any of us. September 11th reminds us of those people, too.
I don't have any grand takeaway from this remembrance of good and evil, but I think it speaks for itself. September 11th itself may fade, but it symbolizes things we cannot forget: terror and awe, honor and nobility, fear and glory, cruelty and mercy. These are harsh words, words that we seek to hide amid mundanity, and often it is well that we do. But they will never quite vanish.