My son came home from school Friday, and I asked him what he learned that day. It’s the same question I ask every day, and it usually gets a response along the lines of “not to talk to smegheads like you,” as he walks away eating pretzels dipped in nutella. Instead, he said he watched a movie about 9/11.
This struck me as strange, as he and his classmates were alive when 9/11 happened. Many of the kids in his school had an intimate connection, including family members who died. Yet they were watching a movie of the event. I asked him if he remembered 9/11, and he told, “not really.” It had become no more real than World War II or Vietnam, something that students discussed in history class. Something that happened to someone else, long ago.
I realized that for him, for his friends and classmates, life post 9/11 was his version normal. He was a member of the 9/11 generation, a generation of young people who grew up in a world where the USA Patriot Act was what the law merely was. Where posters and television commercials imploring people “if you see something, say something,” was omnipresent. Where national guardsmen with automatic weapons and camouflage fatigues were supposed to be hanging around Penn Station, and police checked people’s bags at will.
In school, children are inundated with “messages” from MADD, SADD and Dare. Classes are regularly interrupted for assemblies about respecting others, sometimes because of sexual tendencies, other times because of feelings hurt by “bullies.” They are warned about AIDS and more sexually transmitted diseases than I ever knew existed, how sex will kill them. If a myriad of other horribles didn’t kill them first.
There is a laundry list of subjects that cannot be mentioned, no less discussed or joked about, in schools. On top of the list is anything that refers, relates, even obliquely mentions, anything that can be remotely construed as violence. One of the most important things a parents can teach his child is to never mention the words gun, knife, bow and arrow or slingshot in school. If they even think the word “bomb,” alarms will go off and troopers will immediately seize you. If heard, the child will be required to go for psychological testing and approval before being allowed back to school, for fear that he’s about to engage in the next Columbine. They will take no risk whatsoever.
For the most part, their facility with computers is quite amazing, and yet they have no expectation of privacy. It’s not as if they care, though, as they will do and see and look at anything they please without a second thought, but they simultaneously hold no illusion that someone can’t find out exactly what they are doing if they want to. The only safe haven is that they don’t think anyone will want to.
They have all been on airplanes, and can’t conceive of flying where they aren’t required to wait on a long line and prove their identity, take off their shoes, put their things in bins to be viewed by a uniform behind an x-ray. They know that airplane travel means they are subject to search, whether magnetometer, visual or official touching. They’ve never known a domestic flight where this didn’t happen, or they were served a delicious meal for free on china.
For those of us who spend time thinking about how things have changed since 9/11, since every dead child gets a law named after him, since well-meaning people impose rules they mistakenly believe will cure every potential threat to a safe and perfect world, we haven’t given up the fight to return life to some earlier day. This generation doesn’t remember that earlier day, when the post-9/11 rules and ways didn’t exist. In a few more years, they will have never known such a time.
In an old man’s mind, I envision a day when school children will be taught that the USA Patriot Act was terrible mistake made in knee-jerk, visceral reaction to terrible circumstances, like the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. They will be asked to compare the TSA Scope and Grope with the internment of Japanese during World War II. Students will be allowed to run as fast as they can on the playground, and some will fall down and skin their knee. Others will say something hurtful and get popped in the nose for it, and never say it again.
This world is foreign to our children. It’s a world they’ve either can’t remember or have never known. They will never balk at having to remove their shoes on a line at the airport, or having to hold their tongue lest a word come out that will get them expelled from school and labeled a sex offender.
See their world through the eyes of our children, the post-9/11 world, and realize that this is their normal. This is the legacy of 9/11, that there is now a generation that has no memory of life before it “changed everything.”
Prior 9/11 Posts: 9/11/07 , 9/11/08, 9/11/09, 9/11/10.
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Thank you Scott for this great post.
As for this (not too) old man, he daily blesses Louis Brandeis, who wrote:
“The makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness. They recognized the significance of man’s spiritual nature, of his feelings and of his intellect. They knew that only part of the pain, pleasure and satisfactions of life are to be found in material things. They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred against the government, the right to be let alone—the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.” (Olmstead v US, 1928, dissenting opinion)
Now, it seems to me, either Brandeis was mistaken as to which right is most valued or civilized men (and women) are rarer than they once were.
The “right to be left alone” is one of my most cherished rights, and one that is given the least respect.
So very true…the 9/11 generation. Recently I was told to take down my blog posts that pertain to anything about the actions of the prosecutor or court decisions in my case. When I told my 19 year old son about it he just said “Mom, don’t you know the rules of social media, there are some things you just don’t talk about.” I was just left standing there, feeling like a scolded little kid holding on to a scrap piece of paper that said “1st Amendment Rights”. They do see a different America and think nothing of it.
My 9-11 memory is watching the second plane hit the tower on our office television in Albany. I remember going over to court thinking that there was no way Judge McAvoy would go forward on sentencing my client after the third plane hit the Pentagon. He did and it was bad. The next week, I took Amtrak down to the city to argue a case in the Second Circuit. It was held at the bar association in midtown. The panel was seated at something the size and height of a card table. I towered over them. Afterward, I went outside to see a police car cut off a cabbie, who then leaned out his window raised his middle finger and began to curse out NYPD. I wondered “everything has changed”?
When you argued before the circuit, I was allowed into the red zone to get files from my office, walking up and down 52 floors, because they weren’t going to let me in again for six months. But it didn’t matter, since I had no telephone anyway.
In an old man’s mind, I envision a day when school children will be taught that the USA Patriot Act was terrible mistake made in knee-jerk, visceral reaction to terrible circumstances, like the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.
From your keyboard to God’s eyes. Amen.
Your son is a fan of Red Dwarf? He must be a pretty cool kid. I haven’t met many other people who like, let alone know, Red Dwarf.