Incoming Northeastern freshmen weren’t born yet, as nation marks 9/11’s 25th anniversary
Sept. 11 is history to students, as the nation marks its 25th anniversary
Twenty-five years ago, news spread that a plane hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City – slamming between the 92nd and 98th floors of the massive 110 story building, one of a pair of structures known as the Twin Towers in Lower Manhattan’s financial district.
It was 8:46 am. local time on September 11, 2001.
And that was only the first strike by hijackers who used just boxcutters as weapons to seize control of four commercial airliners that fateful morning. Some 12 hours later, almost 3,000 people were dead and the words of then-President George W. Bush would be forever etched into the national psyche: “Today, our nation saw evil.”
It’s a day that 93% of people who were 10 years or older at the time have a “vivid” recall of exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news, according to a Pew Research Center poll released on September 3, ahead of Friday’s 25th anniversary, of what has commonly become known as 9/11.
But 10% of Americans alive today were not yet born according to a Pew.
That number would include almost all the incoming freshmen students at Northeastern University and other college-age young adults across the nation.
“I struggle to convey to my students what happened,” Aaron Daniels, a teaching professor in the psychology department, told Northeastern Global News, as he recalled how two commercial airplanes destroyed both towers of the World Trade Center, leaving behind a pile of molten rubble. Another jet hit the Pentagon and a fourth crashed in a Pennsylvania field after passengers fought back, their plan transmitted to operators and loved ones by cell phone.
“I’m dead center Generation X,” Daniels said, who is over 50. “I remember rushing to explain the events rationally in my head, but it wasn’t working. I remember having to just sit down, being short of breath. It was horrifying…. It was later that day when I began to feel how truly world-altering this was.”
Of the younger generation, he said that they don’t have the collective grief that the nation felt at the time. For some young adults, “it’s just a dark joke on the Internet,” he said.
The Pew poll of 5,000 Americans found that 6-in-10 young adults between the ages of 18 and 24 learned about the attack only only in school books. Parents or family members told the story to 16%, and another 14% of young adults don’t recall where they heard about it, the study found.
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Of the anniversary, “Friday’s another Friday,” said Tat Nguyen, 18, a freshman accounting student at Northeastern, who said she first learned about the event at elementary school, not her parents.
“I couldn’t understand it growing up, but I learned more in high school history classes,” said Nguyen of Springfield, Massachusetts. “But we weren’t there. We don’t feel the sadness older people do.”
But Julian Pamameno, 20, a sophomore from Long Island, New York, who studies accounting at Northeastern, said he has strong feelings about the anniversary.
He first heard about 9/11 at school while in the fifth grade. He went home and talked to his parents about it.
“At the time, my dad worked in Manhattan, near the Trade Center. He was off that day, but it was a big impact. He could have been there, “ Pamameno said. “I couldn’t believe that something like that could happen. Before, I thought the whole world was this innocent, perfect place.”
Professor Daniel Aldrich, a dean’s professor at the College of Social Sciences and Humanities, said memorials and remembrances of the event help to solidify the cultural memory, such as the “Ground Zero” memorial at the National September 11 Memorial and Museum in lower Manhattan.
Aldrich likened the day to the World War Two attack on Pearl Harbor, when Japan launched a surprise attack on the four U.S. battleships and other craft, killing 2,403 people. There were 1,177 sailors and marines who perished onboard the largest battleship, the USS Arizona, which remains underwater today, as the focal point of a large memorial erected in Hawaii.
Most Americans alive today only know of Pearl Harbor, the event that drove America to War, through history books, movies and memorials.
That’s the way Ainara Soto, 18, an economics sophomore student from Hartford, Connecticut feels. She remembers in school, on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 that the classes lined up in the auditorium to all say the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag.
And her parents once took her to visit the “Ground Zero” memorial in Manhattan while they were there visiting relatives in New York.
“I think I feel sad that it happened,” Soto said. “I acknowledge that with respect, but I don’t feel what my parents do.”
On Boston’s campus, there is a lone granite marker with a bronze plate in remembrance of Northeastern student Candace Lee Williams, 20, who lost her life aboard American Airlines Flight 11 – the plane the terrorists flew into the trade center’s North Tower.
Isaac Pedersen, 21, of Portland, Oregon, a senior studying marketing, said that both his parents remember exactly where they were on that day, but he didn’t think much about the tragic event it until high school when he started getting interested in politics and wondered why the U.S. went to war in the Middle East.
“I have an understanding, intellectually, that it is really a big deal, but I have no connection to that,” Pedersen said. “I don’t feel guilty about not thinking about it, much.”
Both Aldrich and Daniels said that the aftermath of 9/11 has affected the lives of the incoming class of freshmen in ways that they might realize.
Aldrich said that circumstances surrounding the event led to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, where many independent government agencies such as the CIA and the FBI were put under an umbrella that also included the U.S. Coast Guard and airport security.
Before that day, no government agency scanned passengers’ faces at airports. There were no endless lines for the Transportation Security Authority that for years asked people to take off their shoes, Aldrich said.
Alex Sheinbaum, 18, a freshman studying finance, from Cary, North Carolina, whose grandmother was in Manhattan on 9/11 and saw what happened said he understands the need for airport security. He said he has more patience with it than many of his peers.
He thinks it’s because his parents sat him down when he was about 5 years old to first start talking about 9/11.
“They told me it was this tragic event,” he said. “It should be talked about in school more. I remember they talked about it on some of the anniversaries in school, but not much more.”
“I do absolutely feel grief, even if it’s vicarious grief,” Sheinnbaum added.
