The Day That (Sort of) Changed Everything
Some thoughts on America, 9/11, and surviving bad times.
Happy Thanksgiving to those who are celebrating! This is something I thought might resonate on a day when we’re supposed to find something for which to be thankful, and it’s a good opportunity for me to thank all of you for making Foreign Exchanges possible. That especially goes for our subscribers. If you’re not one of those, please consider becoming one:
This is an adaptation of my old 9/11 essay written for an event on Luke O’Neil’s We Had It Coming book tour. It’s somewhat revised and expanded for the newsletter. You can pick up a copy of the book today and subscribe to his Welcome to Hell World newsletter.
For those of you who don’t know me, I write a lot—almost every day when I’m not taking a break—about what’s happening in the world. It sounds weird to say that I derive satisfaction from that, given how bleak the world seems to be on most days, but I do. It helps me to make sense of things and forces me to pay attention to The News (OK maybe that part isn’t so satisfying). It lets me revisit places I’ve been and learn new things about places I’ve never been and probably will never go. One thing that kind of writing doesn’t do, because it’s so fixed in time and space, is lend itself to this sort of event—so please bear with me. I’m such a neophyte at this that Luke had to explain to me in embarrassing detail what I was supposed to do.
Back in 2019 I wrote a few thoughts on the 18th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Until then I had mostly avoided sharing any thoughts, feelings, or memories of that day publicly because it seemed morbid to me, fixing us all on a terrible event that had become the justification for inflicting so many more terrible events on the rest of the world over the years that followed. I know others felt differently—like Ari Fleischer, who used to recount his 9/11 experience in real time on Twitter every year until he stopped doing that right around the time he started working for the Saudi government.
Good for him. It’s important to stay busy, right?
The 18th anniversary struck a particular chord with me, because I realized that we’d reached the point where people who weren’t alive on that day could nevertheless enlist to fight in the war it sparked, the glorious Global War on Terror. As I thought about that macabre milestone it occurred to me that there were really two 9/11s, one apparent to Americans and one largely hidden from them. The former was full of rage, confusion, and fear—fear of another attack, fear of mosques, fear of the mail. Fear, above all, of the Other. The latter was full mostly of death—over 4.5 million deaths around the world (directly and indirectly caused by the GWOT), according to a study that Brown University’s “Costs of War” project released two years ago.
I revisited those thoughts as I was casting around for something to read to you today and the thing that stuck out to me is that we (and I mean a very collective “we” so I’m not talking about you folks specifically) are still fixed to that day somehow. The rage, the confusion, and especially the fear are all still there. Consider some of the things that are now being done in our names:
Paramilitary squads, barely trained but very eager and very armed, are roaming our cities and disappearing people our government has decided are Scary, Unworthy, Other. Inhuman. Why are they Other? Because of where they’re from. Or the color of their skin. Or something they believe.
The lucky disappeared might find themselves deported back to their countries of origin, even if they haven’t been back to those places in decades and even if it means cleaving them from their families. The unlucky are being trafficked, shipped off to places they’ve never been, where they have no one, where they probably don’t speak the language, and where they’ll probably be imprisoned.
Our government has spent two years facilitating a genocide, supporting an allied government that has been killing and starving children. Its victims are likewise deemed Scary, Other, and ultimately Inhuman. Even now, under a nominal ceasefire, that government continues to restrict their food while our president talks nonchalantly about depriving them of their homes, their land, and their human rights.
That same president, in the unholy amalgamation of the War on Terror, the War on Drugs, and the War on the Scary Other, now has his military blowing up boats two or three times a week, killing a handful of people each time. Supposedly these boats are carrying drugs and drug traffickers, but we’re just supposed to take his word for that. This is why “due process” exists, because we shouldn’t just have to take the president’s word that the people he kills had it coming. But you can’t give due process to somebody after they’re already dead. And when it comes to Scary Others, the president of the United States has the power to decide which of them get to live and which don’t.
I don’t want to convey the wrong impression here. It’s not like we’ve all supported or even condoned these things. Some of us have, but many have not. But has it mattered? The disappearances continue. The bombings keep coming. The genocide rolls on. Donald Trump has used the opposition to his paramilitary kidnap squad to justify putting soldiers on the streets of US cities, which could just make everything worse. And every day feels like it holds the potential for some new horror. Now we’re going to start testing nukes again? Or not. Maybe we’ll invade Nigeria. Stay tuned!
It’s tempting to blame a lot of this on the meltdown this country experienced after 9/11. The most lasting damage those attacks inflicted was not to our buildings but to our collective psyche. They took a nation of people who’d felt strong, invincible really, the Winners of History, and shattered that fragile sense of confidence. Torture, mass surveillance, and all that killing ensued. As I wrote on the anniversary, “we’ve accepted that war is an inevitable and permanent state of being, that our government may be fighting an undefined conflict with an undefined enemy with an undefined end goal for the rest of our lives. For the rest of our children’s lives.”
What I’ve realized upon reflection is that this is an incomplete picture. The United States in 2025 isn’t the product of 9/11 because this is to some degree what it’s always been. Is it any wonder that a country that was born in genocide centuries ago has no problem helping a buddy carry one out today? Surely our current brutality toward people deemed Unworthy—toward people of color—has obvious historical analogues. Is our xenophobic fear of the Scary Other really stronger now than it was when we threw Japanese Americans into internment camps?
Haven’t we always been the kind of people who scoff at spending millions on fighting malaria in Africa even as we spend trillions on jets that don’t work? Who obsess over the possibility that an undocumented person might accidentally get treated at an ER while our bombs litter the ruins of places like Gaza? Who struggle to imagine anything getting better if it means somebody Unworthy might benefit?
I think so. It feels that way at least. And yet on some level what’s happening now does also feel different.
I can’t explain the dichotomy, and I don’t pretend to speak with any authority. But I find myself worrying more these days, slipping more easily into worst case scenarios in my mind. Maybe that’s a function of age. Maybe it’s a function of parenting an 18 year old and wondering what kind of world she’s going to be entering when she leaves our home to go off to college and beyond. What’s going to happen when our national fear of the Other runs headlong into mass displacement from climate change? What do we do if a president decides that the real terrorist threat isn’t a wedding party in Afghanistan or a speedboat in the tropics, but something much closer to home? How long before AI comes for her job—not because it can do it better, but because it will do it much, much cheaper?
But I do think it goes beyond the personal. We’re bombarded with horrors every day—on The News, online, and increasingly in our own neighborhoods. The most consistent through-line in all of those horrors is that, to borrow a phrase from our former president, nothing fundamentally ever seems to change.
I don’t know how to fix that, but in the moments when I really start to despair I come back, believe it or not, to 9/11. Not because of what happened in 2001, but because it’s my daughter’s birthday. That’s a whole other story, but basically we needed a last minute c-section and, surprise surprise, all the days around September 11 were fully booked. For my family That Day marks a happy occasion, not a sad or scary one. It’s a small thing, but it tells me that life can and does change for the better. I remind myself of it when things seem really bleak. So far, at least, it’s worked. I hope each of us can find a touchstone that we can come back too when that feeling of doom sets in. Thanks for letting me share it with you.