The fading immediacy of Sept. 11
I remember the explosion of the Challenger only vaguely. I was still in elementary school, and remember — I think; it’s hazy — being told during lunch that the shuttle launch had failed. This was the watch-every-launch-on-TVs-rolled-into-classrooms era, so the school was attuned to the moment. That said, I don’t remember anyone’s reaction, including my own.
I remember Sept. 11, 2001 with much more clarity. This isn’t surprising; I was older and the disaster more recent. It was also much more damaging, both in human and geopolitical terms.
There are lots of ways to reflect on 9/11, but this is the way I tend to do so: as a marker on our paths through history. I remember the day it happened, but many people don’t. An ever increasing number of people don’t. This signal moment in America’s and my own life is, for many Americans, now an abstraction.
We can measure this. If we assume that one can form permanent memories at about the age of four, fully a third of Americans alive last year were too young to remember the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
You’ll notice that I’ve added some other historic moments there: the Challenger explosion, the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the end of World War II. There are, at the moment, far more people who are too young to remember Sept. 11 than there are people old enough to remember Kennedy’s assassination or V-E Day.
In 2001, 4 in 10 Americans were old enough to remember those events, twice the percentage that can at this point. Only a small portion of the population was aged three or under and therefore too young to remember the attacks.
It’s interesting to compare the two populations directly. You can see how the group of people too young to remember Sept. 11 growing, as you would expect — but can also see the winnowing of those older groups as segments of the population.
What’s remarkable about the shift since 2001 is that the U.S. population has grown — but that the population under the age of 50 has grown by only 5 percent while the population aged 50 and over has grown by 56 percent.
In other words, the percentage of Americans who remember Sept. 11 is relatively small given how disproportionately old the American population has grown.
And yet a third of Americans don’t remember that day. Didn’t spend the day glued to the TV, didn’t watch the towers fall in real time. A third of Americans didn’t experience the day and a huge portion of them also didn’t experience what happened next: the overhaul of American politics and the surge to war.
Never forget, they say, but every year fewer Americans are able to remember even if they wanted to. Every year, fewer of us remember the lessons learned from the attack’s aftermath, too.
Photo: The World Trade Center towers. (National Archives)
Update: YouGov asked American adults if they remember where they were on Sept. 11, 2001. Here are the responses by age.
Why do only 7 percent say they weren’t yet born? Because this is only people aged 18 and up.