“Viewpoints” is a place on Chapelboro where local people are encouraged to share their unique perspectives on issues affecting our community. All thoughts, ideas, opinions and expressions in this series are those of the author, and do not reflect the work, reporting or approval of 97.9 The Hill and Chapelboro.com. If you’d like to contribute a column on an issue you’re concerned about, interesting happenings around town, reflections on local life — or anything else — send a submission to viewpoints@wchl.com.
The World That Never Got to Exist
A perspective from Matt Hughes
I was ten years old on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, and like millions of Americans, the day started like any other under a perfect, crystal blue sky. I was going to be late to school because, for whatever reason, the school bus had forgotten to stop at my house. As I was waiting for my mom to drive me to Central Elementary in Hillsborough, Good Morning America was on and my great-grandpa and I were watching like we did most mornings when news of the first plane’s collision with the North Tower of the World Trade Center, later determined to be American Airlines Flight 11, flashed across the screen. Everyone on television was trying to understand how a plane could have crashed on such a perfect day. Then United Airlines Flight 175 came into view and struck the South Tower in a moment forever seared into my memory. I turned to my great-grandpa, who often told me what it was like growing up during World War II, and said, “We’re at war.” I was only ten, but I knew enough about what was happening in the world to understand that what we were watching was not an accident. I remembered the bombing of the USS Cole the year before. Seeing that second plane hit made it clear, even to ten-year-old me, that America was under attack and things would be different. By that evening, even home felt different. I went outside and looked up at a completely empty sky. We lived close enough to RDU that airplanes flying overhead were ordinary sights, but that night there were none. America’s skies were silent in a way they had scarcely been since the earliest days of aviation. And some of that feeling never completely went away. For nearly a decade after September 11, the mere thought of getting on an airplane could bring me to the brink of an anxiety attack. Even today, when I fly, there is sometimes a thought in the back of my mind about a possible lapse in airport security or someone with bad intentions being on my flight. I still don’t particularly like spending long periods of time in tall buildings either. I know intellectually that both are safe, but September 11 left behind an instinct that is harder to reason away. For those of us who were kids that morning, ordinary things had become instruments of unimaginable violence. An airplane was no longer just an airplane. A skyscraper was no longer simply a building. Some measure of our innocence disappeared before we were really old enough to understand why. Twenty-five years later, there remains a clear dividing line between the world before September 11 and the world that came after it. Our laws, airports, military, government agencies and understanding of national security changed. America entered wars whose consequences stretched across decades. Our relationship with ourselves and the rest of the world changed with them. Nearly 3,000 people from countries, faiths and backgrounds around the world were murdered that morning in New York, at the Pentagon and aboard United Flight 93 in Pennsylvania. Nineteen al-Qaeda terrorists turned four commercial airplanes into weapons as part of a plot orchestrated by the terrorist network led by Osama bin Laden. Nearly a decade later, in May 2011, American forces finally brought bin Laden to justice in Abbottabad, Pakistan. It was a moment of justice for an America that had waited nearly ten years, but his death could neither restore the lives he helped take nor undo the world his actions helped create. But remembering September 11 requires remembering more than the people who attacked us. It requires remembering the people who responded: the first responders who ran toward danger, strangers who helped strangers, coworkers who refused to leave one another behind and the passengers of Flight 93 who fought back. On one of the darkest days in American history, ordinary people demonstrated extraordinary courage. I encountered those stories in a different way in January 2018, when I visited the 9/11 Memorial and Museum in New York. What struck me most were the individual lives behind them. These were ordinary people helping other ordinary people, people whose paths likely never would have crossed but for the terrible circumstances that brought them together that morning. We sometimes tell stories of heroism in ways that make the people involved seem almost mythical, and some of what happened that day really does feel like heroism befitting a Greek tragedy. But standing there, confronted with their names, photographs, possessions and stories, I was reminded that they were human beings who, when confronted with extraordinary circumstances, did extraordinary things. The visit affected me in a way I hadn’t expected. I grew up in Hillsborough, North Carolina, hundreds of miles from Manhattan, the Pentagon and Shanksville. I didn’t lose a parent, sibling or friend that morning. Yet September 11 has been a presence in my life since I was ten years old, as it has been for so many who lived through that day and even those who had not yet been born. Visiting the memorial gave me a measure of closure I didn’t realize I had been looking for. But closure isn’t quite the same thing as letting go. There is still an unshakable grief when I think about September 11, not only for the lives taken that morning, but for everything that came afterward. Sometimes I find myself grieving a world that never got to exist. I wonder what America and the world would have been had those 19 men never boarded those planes. What wars might never have been fought? What lives might never have been lost? How much human potential was snuffed out in 102 minutes? What fears might never have become part of our daily lives? What might our country look like today? History doesn’t allow us to know. But there is something profoundly sad about knowing that one morning altered the trajectory of millions of lives around the world. A quarter-century also gives us enough distance to remember September 11 without pretending everything America did afterward was right. Sometimes fear overwhelmed our better judgment. Muslim Americans and people perceived to be Muslim endured suspicion, harassment and violence for crimes they did not commit. Our government adopted policies in the name of security that tested our commitments to civil liberties and human rights. Afghanistan became America’s longest war. The invasion of Iraq followed, based on intelligence claims that proved disastrously wrong, with consequences that would reverberate across the region for decades. Acknowledging those failures does not diminish the evil of September 11, nor does condemning that evil require defending every decision our government made in our names afterward. We can honor those who were murdered and those who demonstrated extraordinary courage while examining honestly what fear ended up costing us. We should also remember the solidarity that followed. Americans hung flags from their homes, filled blood banks, held vigils and signed up to defend their country. Members of Congress gathered on the steps of the Capitol and sang together. That unity was imperfect and, for some Americans, painfully incomplete. But the instinct behind it was real. Twenty-five years later, we too often speak about fellow Americans as though they are enemies rather than family, neighbors, friends or coworkers. Distrust is easier to cultivate than confidence. Outrage travels faster than empathy. But unity should not be confused with conformity. Ours has always been a fractious and disputational republic. We argue about what freedom requires, what justice demands and how democracy should work because disagreement itself is part of the freedom we defend. The lesson of September 11 should not be that Americans must think alike, speak with one voice or fall in line behind our government. We learned enough in the years that followed about the dangers of allowing fear or appeals to national unity to silence legitimate dissent. Perhaps the better lesson is that our disagreements, however profound, exist within something larger that we share. We can argue fiercely over how America should live up to its ideals without treating those who disagree with us as enemies of America. The attack was aimed not only at American lives, but at what America represented. For all of our imperfections and all the times we have fallen short of our own ideals, America has stood as a beacon of freedom, democracy and justice. For all the times we have failed to live up to that promise, people from around the world have continued to come to our shores believing in America’s potential. Those ideals were part of what the terrorists sought to attack that morning. They are also part of what endured that day. Our failure to live up to those ideals perfectly does not make them less worthy of defending. It makes the work of realizing them more important. Defending them requires more than military strength. It means refusing to surrender our values when we are afraid, distinguishing terrorists and extremists from entire religions or peoples, and protecting both our homeland security and our constitutional freedoms. Patriotism can include questioning our country’s decisions because wanting America to live up to its ideals is itself one of the greatest expressions of faith in America. Twenty-five years ago, I stood outside my home and looked into a sky without planes. At ten years old, I knew something had changed. What I could not understand was how much of my life, and the lives of millions of others, would unfold in the shadow of that day. September 11 is becoming history for a growing number of Americans. There are adults today who were not alive when the towers fell. That makes remembering more important, not less. We should remember the 2,977 people who were killed, the first responders who ran toward danger, the passengers who fought back, those who later died from illnesses linked to Ground Zero and the service members who answered their country’s call. We should remember the families who went to bed on September 10 expecting an ordinary tomorrow and whose lives were never ordinary again. We should remember our mistakes, too, because history is useful only if we are willing to learn from it, especially when it hurts to do so. We cannot choose the history we inherited from that day. But we can choose what we carry forward from it: the courage, the belief in one another and the resolve. And may we never forget. Matt Hughes is a Commissioner for the Town of Hillsborough and a member of the Democratic National Committee.“Viewpoints” on Chapelboro is a recurring series of community-submitted opinion columns. All thoughts, ideas, opinions and expressions in this series are those of the author, and do not reflect the work or reporting of 97.9 The Hill and Chapelboro.com.
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