Our granddaughter told us that she learned about 9/11 in her US history class. She was born 12 years after the attacks. She is about as removed from 9/11 as World War II is for me.
That realization left me with a question: How do we teach future generations about 9/11?
I looked back at my posts about the attacks over the past 25 years. Immediately after the attacks, they spoke about determination and how we can reconnect with our deepest values to become stronger and better. But as time went on, I discovered that my assumptions were wrong. The further we got from the event, the more we leaned into paranoia and division. A clear through line emerged between September 11, January 6, and the chaos that we’re living in today.
The 9/11 children are getting today isn’t the 9/11 we experienced 25 years ago and all its transformations in between. They’re getting the watered-down, cleaned-up version. No people jumping out of windows. No Alex Jones claiming jet fuel can’t melt steel beams. No pompous billionaire claiming he now has the tallest building in Manhattan after the Twin Towers fell. No withheld warnings about air quality and years of Congress denying first responders funds for medical care. Just terrible plane crashes and the brave heroes who risked their lives to save others.
The same thing happened to me about World War II. It was already thoroughly mythologized by the time I started learning about it. We didn’t learn about Manzanar until well after we were in high school, and it was only because we had a teacher willing to cover it.
The truth about World War II and 9/11 is that they’re not just events fixed in the past. The consequences of those events are still unfolding today. You see reverberations of World War II in Ukraine and Gaza. We are still in the wake of what happened on 9/11. The upheavals here and abroad from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the surveillance state that emerged from the Patriot Act, and the Islamophobia that has sprung up again all show that 9/11 didn’t end when the last plane crashed.
In Christina’s Portrait, I write, “History is a story we tell ourselves about ourselves. Where we came from. Why things are the way they are. What we had to overcome and what we have to learn.” But it is a story that isn’t finished, and its ending is unknown. It’s up to all of us to write the next chapter.
So that is what we should really teach my granddaughter and her peers about 9/11. It isn’t something that happened in the past. We’re all living in it now.
Related topics:
Don’t confuse history with nostalgia
Protecting our children’s innocence
The importance of history
Bridging the empathy gap
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