At three minutes after nine a.m., one kind of America ended, and another one began.
That was the moment the second plane, United Airlines Flight 175, hit the South Tower, and the discussion about whether this was terrorism or some kind of horrible accident ended. It wasn’t a question anymore.
Two minutes later, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card leaned over President George W. Bush in a Florida classroom and whispered, “A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack.”
Up until that moment, from the time reports of the first plane hitting the World Trade Center made it to air, there were questions.
In my mind, I was gobsmacked by how this kind of accident could have happened. Was there some kind of catastrophic navigation or control failure? Possible, but on a clear morning in New York, it just didn’t make much sense.
It had happened before in New York. On July 28, 1945, in heavy fog, a U.S. Army Air Forces B-25 Mitchell bomber crashed into the 79th floor of the Empire State Building, killing 14 people.
Could air traffic control around New York have suffered some kind of massive failure? Again, maybe. But pilots sit behind a big window in the cockpit, and the weather over New York that morning was clear. The World Trade Center was awfully hard to miss.
On purpose, then?
Was a pilot committing suicide? There had been cases of pilots deliberately crashing airliners. But crashing into a crowded office building, too? Taking everybody on the plane and all those people in the building with you?
Maybe it was terrorism. The World Trade Center had been bombed before.
But just one plane into a building?
Just one plane…
And as all of those possibilities were looking for a nightmare to latch onto, the second jet came into view, right there on the TV screen. The anchor I was watching hadn’t really noticed it yet, didn’t say anything about it until the jet disappeared behind the building and then a massive fireball erupted out the visible side.
There it is, my friend. This is terrorism. This kind of accident doesn’t happen twice.
And then chaos, as reporters and anchors tried to make some sense of the realization that this was a coordinated attack on the United States, something that felt like it belonged in a movie. Except it was happening live, right there on the television.
And a new America was born at the instant of that fireball, and the realization that it had been caused by a second plane.
That was the birth. The rest of the morning cut the cord.
At 9:37, American Airlines Flight 77 hit the Pentagon.
At 9:59, the South Tower collapsed.
Four minutes later, United Flight 93 crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after passengers and crew fought back against the hijackers.
At 10:28, the North Tower came down.
Around all of it came evacuations, conflicting reports, and rumors. At one point there was a report that a car bomb had exploded outside the State Department. It hadn’t. Nobody knew how many attacks there were, how many planes might still be out there, or when it was going to end.
Later, we learned about two D.C. Air National Guard pilots who took off from Andrews in F-16s without missiles. Marc Sasseville and Heather Penney were prepared to ram another hijacked airliner with their own jets if that was what it took to bring it down. They would sacrifice their lives if need be.
But by the time they got into the air, Flight 93 was already down. They didn’t know that yet.
As this new America grew, it developed a new sense of fundamentalism. Black-and-white thinking. Us or them.
No more saying goodbye at the gate in the airport. The TSA. New layers of screening for everyone and everything getting onto a plane. The PATRIOT Act. Expanded surveillance. Warrantless wiretapping. A much larger national-security apparatus. Broad authorizations for military force that presidents of both parties would use for decades.
And, of course, 9-11 became rocket fuel for conspiracy thinking.
The Jews were responsible. Bush did it. It was an inside job.
And later, the deniers. There weren’t any planes. The footage was fake. The people who said they saw it happen were paid actors.
That kind of thinking metastasized. It became part of the response to all sorts of major traumatic events, including mass shootings.
We’re still living in the America that was born at 9:03 that morning.
If you look at much of what happens around us now, in politics, surveillance, immigration, warfare, and the way we talk about threats, you can often find a thread that connects back to 9-11.
The threat of another 9-11, whether it comes from foreign terrorists or people politicians portray as threats from within, became political currency. Fear became a way to get votes. Politicians on both sides learned the language. The lingua franca is 9-11, or some metaphor for it.
It is the defining moment.
That single moment changed our country. It changed us.
It still echoes. Perhaps it may echo as long as the Civil War has in our national psyche. There are plenty of ways the Civil War is still affecting our lives today.
We learned lessons from 9-11. Some of them were good. Some of them were expedient. And some of them were terrible.
It is the world we live in now, for better or for worse.