And the impossible became possible…

And the impossible became possible…

It is hard to believe, but just 26 years ago, I could quite calmly board a plane in any European country holding a huge bottle of water. No one forced me to take off my sneakers, liquids did not have to be poured into 100-milliliter bottles, and the journey to the airport itself did not resemble a heroic quest…

Of course, our world continued to change after that. And today, these changes for the worse sometimes wash over us at such a speed that we barely have time to get used to them. But a great deal began precisely then — on September 11, 2001, when the impossible suddenly became possible.

Four passenger planes were hijacked by Al-Qaeda terrorists. Two crashed into the towers of the World Trade Center, the third into the Pentagon, and the fourth crashed in Pennsylvania after passengers attempted to regain control of the aircraft.

2,977 people died, not including the 19 hijackers.

That is what the list of victims looked like back then. A quarter of a century later, it turns out that this list is still not complete.

## September 11 continues to kill

When the towers of the World Trade Center collapsed, a huge cloud blanketed Lower Manhattan. It contained particles of concrete and glass, asbestos, metals, and combustion products. Firefighters, police officers, paramedics, and volunteers worked on the ruins for days. Then came construction workers and laborers clearing Ground Zero. Nearby, ordinary New Yorkers continued to live and work.

Years went by — and people began to be diagnosed with respiratory illnesses, followed by various types of cancer and other severe diseases. Today, the US federal World Trade Center Health Program, created to monitor and treat people exposed to the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, has more than 150,000 enrolled. More than nine thousand registered participants of the program have already died.

An important caveat is needed here: this does not mean that all of these nine thousand died precisely because of September 11. A person's participation in the program and their subsequent death do not in themselves prove a causal relationship. But the list of illnesses associated with exposure to the toxic environment after the disaster is huge, and doctors continue to record the consequences a quarter of a century later.

It turns out to be a terrifying arithmetic. The towers collapsed in a matter of hours. The cloud dispersed long ago. Ground Zero long ago ceased to be a smoldering wound in the middle of New York. But inside human bodies, September 11 continues. There are people for whom it never ended at all.

Scott Larsen was four years old when his father, firefighter Peter Larsen, died at the World Trade Center. Scott grew up and also became a firefighter. What is more, he came to serve in the very same New York firehouse where his father had worked.

And he is not alone. According to Reuters, 58 children of New York firefighters who died on September 11 later joined the FDNY themselves.

For one generation, September 11 is a day that is impossible to forget. For the next, it is the story of a father whom they do not remember.

And for the third, it is already just a paragraph in a history textbook.

## American-style "Conversations about Important Things"

About a third of Americans living today were born after September 11, 2001. For them, a world with intact Twin Towers has never existed. They do not remember the footage of the second plane entering the South Tower. Or the photos of missing people that covered the walls of New York back then.

America has faced a problem that, of course, no one thought about 25 years ago: how to tell children about September 11? According to an Associated Press study, at least 40 US states require or recommend teaching about the events of 9/11 in schools. It would seem, what is so difficult about that? But the story of September 11 does not end on September 11. Because after that came the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Patriot Act, passed shortly after the attacks, which significantly expanded the capabilities of American intelligence services. The change in attitude toward Muslims in the US. Restrictions on civil rights and freedoms for the sake of common security.

Guantanamo appeared, as did CIA black sites, and years of debates over torture, surveillance, human rights, and how much freedom society is willing to give up in exchange for promises of security.

And one day it turned out that a single American "September 11" does not exist. In some states, the school curriculum emphasizes terrorism, patriotism, the actions of rescue workers, and the subsequent wars. In others, children are asked to discuss civil liberties and government policy after the attacks, as well as the consequences of the "war on terror." That is, they are no longer arguing about what happened, but about what exactly it meant for the citizens of America.

For people of my generation, this is particularly strange. We do not remember September 11 as history. We saw the terrorist attack live on air. In the newsroom, sitting on the floor in the managing editor's office and losing our minds because we had to call our friends and acquaintances living in New York and redesign the first two pages after they had already gone to print…

And now, adults live in America who need to be explained from the very beginning why their parents a quarter of a century ago watched TV and could not believe their own eyes. After all, history always begins at the exact moment when personal memory ends.

With September 11, this is happening right now.

## When tragedy became a meme

There is another ruthless sign of an event turning into history.

When people start joking about it.

On the Internet, September 11 has long existed as more than just a tragedy. It has become a meme, material for reels, computer reconstructions, conspiracy theories, and dark humor.

For a person who remembers how living people fell from windows because they had no way to escape, such an attitude may seem monstrous. For Gen Z, however, this event occurred roughly at the same time as the extinction of the dinosaurs… In this sense, September 11 has suffered the fate of almost any historical disaster. Distance in time gradually strips an event of its immediate horror.

But there is a fundamental difference. Never before has this process occurred in a world with social networks and the ability to retrieve almost any footage of any global disaster from the archives in a matter of seconds. Therefore, for the new generation, September 11 exists in two realities at once. In one, 58 children of deceased firefighters put on the same uniform their fathers wore. In the other, a person born ten years after the attack makes a meme out of a photo of a plane and a collapsing tower. Both of them live in 2026. It is just that for one, it is a family tragedy. For the other, it is ancient history from the Internet.

## The world that September 11 built

What is left of September 11 for those who rarely think about it at all?

A great deal. First, of course, a huge number of inconvenient security rules. We take off our shoes at airports. We measure liquids in carry-on luggage in milliliters. We go through scanners. We present biometrics. We have grown accustomed to surveillance cameras and to the idea that security gives the state the right to know practically everything about us with impunity.

Not all of these measures appeared immediately on September 12, 2001. The American Transportation Security Administration was created after the attacks. Enhanced shoe screening appeared after Richard Reid's attempt to blow up a plane with explosives hidden in his shoe in December of that same year. And the famous liquid restriction arose only in 2006 after the uncovering of a plot involving the suspected use of liquid explosives.

But all of this is branches of the same tree that was planted 25 years ago, and this sapling has grown. Since then, common security has become much more important than convenience. And not just at the airport. The "war on terror" began everywhere. Although the Americans found and killed Osama bin Laden himself, who was accused of those attacks, in Pakistan only ten years later. And one could have put an end to it there.

Only the war did not end. And no one won it.

## There were no winners

To put it very simply, the terrorists did not achieve their main goal. The United States did not disappear. Al-Qaeda lost its former capabilities. Thank God, another terrorist attack of such scale has not occurred on US soil. The security system created after 2001 has indeed learned to prevent much of what previously seemed possible.

But America did not get the victory it hoped for in the fall of 2001 either. The Afghan war ended with the Taliban returning to power in 2021. The war in Iraq changed the entire region and left behind questions for which answers are still being sought.

Hundreds of thousands of people died in various wars of the post-September 11 era… Trillions of dollars were spent on this. And most importantly, the Western world itself has changed. In 2001, Americans feared a terrorist who would quietly sit next to them on a plane. A quarter of a century later, states are still at war with each other. Terrorism has not disappeared, but completely different threats and different adversaries are now at the center of world politics.

The world spent a quarter of a century building a defense system against the next September 11. But the next big shock already looks completely different. It is just that we have become so accustomed to living in the world that emerged after September 11 that we have not even noticed how much it has changed.