By Charles C. W. Cooke
Tuesday, September 08, 2026
Nearly 25 years on from the attacks of September 11,
2001, my overwhelming sentiment remains what it was on that day: anger. Time
often heals — or, at the very least, dulls — but, in this case, it has done no
such thing. I remain livid with the perpetrators for what they did to the 2,977
people who were killed that morning, what they did to the thousands who were
killed in the aftermath, what they did to the United States and the
free world more broadly, and, on a significantly reduced scale, what they did
to me, by abruptly ending my childhood. When bad things happen in the world,
younger people look to adults for reassurance. September 11 was the first time
in my life that that reassurance was not forthcoming. Even from the safety of England, my parents could not hide their shock or
their horror, nor persuasively guarantee me that everything was going to be
alright. To this day, much as is true for so many others, I consider September
11 to be the key dividing line in my life. I woke up as a child. I went to bed
an adult. Beforehand, I knew little about the world, and I was content in my
ignorance. Afterward, I knew all manner of things that I did not want to know.
“May you live in interesting times,” insists the proverb. Screw that.
There is, sadly, nothing unusual about living through an
atrocity. Had I been alive at the time of Pearl Harbor, I would undoubtedly
have similar feelings about that. But I was not, and, besides, while Pearl
Harbor was an abomination, it was an abomination inflicted by one army upon
another, in the midst of an already-raging global conflict. At Pearl Harbor,
military aircraft, piloted by military personnel, attacked military ships full
of military sailors.
Not so on September 11.
Sneering types dislike the contention that the United
States was attacked “for its freedom.” I do not. Irrespective, we can surely
agree that the United States was attacked with its freedom. The
assailants took advantage of a welcoming immigration system; turned quotidian
commercial products into catastrophic weapons; and centered their attack around
a pair of iconic private buildings in which civilians convened to trade with one
another. They transmuted our media into a system for transmitting panic; used
the selflessness of our first responders as a means by which to rack up kills;
and turned the openness of our society into a liability. The architect of the
attacks said, bluntly, that the difference between his band of thugs and the
American people was that “these youths love death as you love life.” Indeed so.
That most of those Americans assumed at first that what he had done to them had
been an accident tells you everything you need to know.
Nothing good came of September 11. Pearl Harbor, like
Operation Barbarossa, brought about the conditions that guaranteed the Allies
would win the war. Antietam led to the Emancipation Proclamation and,
eventually, to the defeat of the Confederacy. September 11 had no salutary
consequence. We would, without doubt, be better off if it had never happened. A
quarter of a century later, I still find myself fantasizing idly about going
back in time to stop it. When I visit New York, I look at the skyline and wonder
if, somehow, the Twin Towers will magically be there. Even now, when I see the
footage, I hope, impotently, that, perhaps this time, the planes will miss.
They never do. They never will. Each time I watch it, three of the four will
ineluctably hit their targets, and I will sit in stunned disbelief as if I were
seeing it for the very first time. I cannot make it go away. It is indelible.
It could have been worse. We now know what we did not at
the time. We know that such attacks did not become commonplace. We know that
the day’s events did not represent the opening salvo in a world war. We know
that they did not permanently scar America’s sense of self — and, indeed, that,
far from dwelling on it, Americans now have to be urged to “never forget.” I am
at no risk of that.
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