On the Changing of Narratives 10 Years After 10 Years After 9/11

Back in 2011, we had a bunch of essays written about 9/11. Mine was “On the Changing of Narratives“.

I was working evenings at that time. It meant that I (usually) got to bed after midnight and slept without having an alarm clock to wake me up in the morning. A friend woke me up a couple of hours before I had been planning to wake up naturally and he told me to turn on the news.

We spent the rest of the day transfixed in front of the television. I left to go fill up the tanks of our cars. I didn’t know when I’d be able to get gas again.

I look back at that now and shake my head.

I remember flying in “the beforetime”. I met my friends and loved ones at the gate. I was able to carry their backpacks as we walked together to the baggage claim.

The shoe bomber made it so that we now take our shoes off at security. It was December 2001 that Richard Reid flew from Paris to Miami and we are still x-raying our shoes before getting to second base with a TSA agent.

Remember the story about the flight that had a bunch of Muslims on it that all got up and used the bathroom in succession and that made everyone on the flight freak out? Shortly thereafter we couldn’t take more than 3 ounces of liquid onto the plane… thus resulting in us throwing all of these potential ingredients for a binary explosive into a giant 55 gallon drum at the airport. Throwing them all in there together.

Perhaps we should thank heaven for small favors that no major TSA policies were installed following the underwear bomber’s failure.

I have a friend who got put on the “no-fly” list for a while. He got put on it after yelling at a TSA agent who insisted on patting him down. The word “Nazi” may have been yelled. We still don’t know how one gets on the no-fly list but the ALCU has done some good work to getting some policies changed so that now the government must tell you if you are on it.

I remember feeling, temporarily, “well, of course this policy makes sense” when any of the above policies were originally announced.

In the same way that I argued that, of course, it makes sense to detain Abdullah al-Muhajir or Muhajir Abdullah or Jose Padilla without charging him just yet because of the dirty bomb. I mean, seriously: Can you imagine how bad things would get if The Terrorists set off a “dirty bomb” in a major metro area? And then a year passed without charges, and then two, and he was finally indicted in 2005. The charges did not include a “dirty bomb”.

We passed the milestone of people born on 9/11 being old enough to vote. In one year, they’ll be old enough to drink (well, buy alcohol legally, anyway). In five years, they’ll be able to rent a car and pay a much lower rate.

An entire generation of people who only now are seeing a world where we aren’t in Afghanistan (and, jeez, the second we weren’t, they saw it fall into the hands of the Taliban). An entire generation of people who have always had to take off their shoes when they flew to Walt Disney World. An entire generation of people who have always lived with a no-fly list. An entire generation of people who have never lived in a world where the debate over whether a policy makes sense. A world with the PATRIOT ACT. A world with the Authorization for Use of Military Force of 2001.

Indeed, this is the way it has always been.

The narrative that we need to change back to the way we used to do it has aged to the point where the way we used to do it is the way that we have always done it.

The other narrative that changed over the course of a few hours back then was the Israel/Palestine one. 9/11 happened smack dab in the middle of the 2nd Intifada and, golly, was *THAT* some bad timing! “Ariel Sharon” became a household name overnight (putting him on equal footing with Yasser Arafat). The questions about “why are we getting involved in that conflict waaaaay over there?” was quickly and easily answered. The arguments about how brave the Palestinians were to be engaging in asymmetrical warfare against a culture with a superior military sort of petered out. The arguments about the Sbarro pizza place or the Dolphinarium nightclub suddenly became a lot less enthusiastic.

The narrative about the Israel/Palestine conflict has changed a great deal as well, over the last 20 years. The Second Intifada finally ran out of gas in 2005 and now the people born as the Sharm El Sheikh Summit was happening are old enough to drive.

The narratives about why we needed to go into Afghanistan have turned to ash over the last 10 years. As have the ones about Israel/Palestine.

The ones about the government needing more power? Those seem to have stuck around.