Life moves pretty fast. Later this week it will be 25 years to the day since I was woken up by a phone call from a friend telling me to turn on the television because “they are crashing planes into the World Trade Centre.”
I did what any sensible person would do and rolled over and went back to sleep after resolving to change my phone number.
When I did get up, exactly 15 minutes before I was due at work, I discovered that I had snoozed and snored my way through a good chunk of one of the great tragedies of the 21st Century.
There has been a lot of water under the bridge since September 11 2001, much of it murky.
When I got to work that Tuesday morning I found that someone had brought a portable television to the office. This was at the Western Review and not everyone had access to the internet, which was still relatively new. So we watched together as the news reports – often contradictory– filtered through.
Back then New York and Washington seemed a long way from Drayton Valley. They still do. But this was an event of such magnitude that, for a while at least, the world suddenly seemed like a much smaller place. Much smaller and quite a bit scarier.
Before 9/11 Canadians thought terror attacks were the kind of thing that only happened to other people. After 9/11 Canadians still thought terror attacks were the kind of thing that only happened to other people, but worryingly, some of those people looked a lot like us.
There’s a bit of a theme here. Back in 2001 there was a lot of concern over further attacks from overseas. But as it turned out, almost all of the terrorism we have seen in North America over the last couple of decades did not come from overseas. It’s come from right here at home and has been carried out by people who (guess what) look a lot like us.
Here in Drayton Valley I knew one person who was so moved by the scale of the suffering on 9/11 that they resolved to get their own life in order and quit drinking and gambling. He said he’d come to realize how precious life was, and was determined not to just piss his away. I ran into him again in the old bar a few years ago and, well, it looked like things hadn’t gone exactly to plan. But the fact he even made the effort goes some way to reflect the impact 9/11 had even in this corner of Alberta.
And it wasn’t just him. A local singer got together with some friends and recorded a song dedicated to the people of New York. Flags were lowered. Prayers were said.
In the weeks that followed it became a popular notion that the 9/11 attacks had changed the world. A quarter of a century later that still feels like a fair assessment.
The planet feels like a darker, more paranoid place than it did before the attacks. We’ve become more suspicious, particularly of people who don’t look exactly like us or think the way we do.
Conspiracy theories existed before 2001, most notably surrounding the assassination of President John F Kennedy. But it was 9/11 that really brought that kind of thinking to the foreground. Perhaps people didn’t want to believe that a small group of fanatical nutcases could pull off such an outrageous act unassisted and looked around for someone else to blame.
But whatever the cause, in the months and years since 9/11 we have seen exponential growth in belief in conspiracies and the associated damage such belief does to our society.
That kind of thinking has led to a loss of trust in institutions ranging from the federal government to the traditional media. It’s become popular to dismiss the work of experts in any field as in some way tainted, simply by virtue of that expertise.
And that in turn has led us to the world we see today, where facts seem to be flexible and everyone has their own version of the truth.
The 9/11 attacks may not have succeeded in their initial aim of bringing America to its knees. But if the broader target was to damage western institutions and make North America a worse place to live … well, here we are.
