One attack, many Americas: Why 9/11 and its many griefs land differently 25 years later

NEW YORK (AP) — When the planes crashed and the buildings fell on that sunny September morning 25 years ago, the shock waves of dismay and grief went far past downtown New York City, rural western Pennsylvania and just outside Washington, D.C.

They radiated through every part of the United States in communities large and small, tearing at Americans’ sense of safety and their place in the world. Hearts were broken across the nation, not just of those who lost their loved ones but among strangers who mourned for them, the Sept. 11 attacks leaving no one unaffected in an unwanted moment of horrifying togetherness.

A quarter of a century later, the effects linger. We all live in a post-9/11 world, with its security strictures and surveillance. But here’s the thing: Americans don’t all live in the SAME one. What the attacks and their aftermath have come to mean isn’t a single viewpoint shared by everyone, for reasons chronological, political and personal.

It’s a tapestry of meaning and grief as varied as the nation in which 9/11 took place.

So many things affect our understanding

It’s somewhat inevitable. After all, the mere passage of time means tens of millions of young Americans have been born since then. For them, 9/11 is something to learn about in history lessons.

But people’s views of 9/11 and its aftermath have also been shaped by human factors like policies and actions taken by those in power. And the America that was attacked was already a nation with its own history and tensions, with stress points of dispute and disagreement put under additional strain by the catastrophic event.

“The same event, whether it’s a disaster or a shock or even the recovery process is completely different depending on your network,” says Daniel Aldrich, a professor at Northeastern University who studies communities and resilience.

Those networks can exist in a range of ways and layers. Among them: those who lost loved ones; those who spent months clearing the rubble and debris from ground zero; those who were motivated to join the military; those who lost jobs in hard-hit industries like tourism and air transportation; those who came from certain countries and communities viewed with heightened suspicion after the attacks.

Different networks overlap in Jenna McPartland’s family. She was expecting her first child with her husband, Ariel Jacobs, who was killed at the World Trade Center. She gave birth days later to their son, Gabriel, whose life was irrevocably altered by an event he didn’t experience.

In the years since, McPartland remarried twice, had two younger sons with no biological tie to their older brother’s dad and has been a stepmom to two teenagers for the last decade. Even as she added new chapters to her life, she made sure Gabi was connected to his father’s family, and that her younger sons also knew that Sept. 11 was part of their larger family story.

“My middle boy wrote his college entrance essay on being the child of a 9/11 family, but not being the 9/11 kid. And how he wouldn’t exist had his brother’s dad not died,” says McPartland, 52, a chef and restaurant owner in Fairfield, Connecticut. “They all acknowledge it in different ways, they feel it in different ways, they sense it in their lives in different ways.”

Varied events play a role in the impact on people

Also playing a role in the impact, and even grief, caused by 9/11: choices that were made after the attacks by the U.S. government like the restructuring of government agencies and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, along with foreign policy decisions like the invasion of Afghanistan.

Immigration had already been a contentious issue before the attack: Who should be allowed to come? Who could stay? What did it mean to be American, and who could claim it? After Sept. 11, it took on another dimension of added fear and suspicion. And much of it fell on people of Muslim faith or coming from Muslim-majority parts of the world.

For example, in 2002, the federal government implemented the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, which required non-U.S. citizen males over 16 from 25 countries, almost all of them Muslim-majority, to register at certain ports of entry or at immigration offices if they were already in the country. Critics condemned it as racial and religious profiling, and it was dismantled in the following decade.

“The idea that there’s this outside threat in the form of people who look like this or from particular countries really fueled the reorganization of the Department of Homeland Security and has continued to fuel the ways in which we’ve funded and contributed to the securitization of our immigration system and society more broadly,” says Jayesh Rathod, a professor at Georgetown Law.

That lingers in the existence of the Transportation Security Administration and the general hardening of security measures in society overall.

“The idea that we need to do everything possible to protect ourselves from whatever this threat is, amorphous threat, has become totally normalized,” Rathod says.

The post-9/11 environment also saw the creation of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is now part of the public’s awareness as the agency carrying out aggressive and highly controversial immigration crackdowns under the Trump administration.

And in a land where racism, xenophobia and stereotypes were part of the landscape, people in other communities felt it too, like Balbir Singh Sodhi, the Arizona gas station owner shot and killed four days after the 9/11 attacks. His assailant killed Sodhi, a bearded and turbaned member of the Sikh faith, assuming he was Arab.

The impact felt by Muslim Americans and others has been part of what Vida Lashgari has learned about the attacks that took place a few years before she was born. Raised in California, her mom Mexican and her dad Persian, the 21-year-old says she “grew up learning about how 9/11 particularly impacted Middle Easterners, Sikhs, brown people as a whole and how that kind of changed their everyday life.”

Her father, she says, and “many Middle Easterners, became more hyper-aware of their appearance, their difference in the way they spoke and dressed in the U.S. after 9/11. And that kind of fear, I think, has carried throughout the Middle Eastern community since then.”

Time passes, and new events take place

While she heard about her father’s experiences and those in her communities, it’s still been history for Lashgari and others like her, born in the years since 2001.

They’re a generation that can’t believe people used to be able to meet visitors inside at airport gates instead of being kept outside. They learned about it in school, the way they did about Pearl Harbor or the Civil War, but didn’t quite know how something could divide life into before and after.

But another seismic event in American culture gave some of them a way to understand the starkness of before and after: the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The pandemic shook up so many lives, especially in my generation who had not experienced some sort of drastic change like that … I think it definitely gave me perspective that there are some things that we can’t be protected from,” Lashgari says.

COVID “was, to this day, the closest I’ve ever felt to my world changing overnight and knowing I had no control over it,” she says.

That an event, no matter how catastrophic and impactful, takes up less space in public memory and is supplanted by new ones is, after all, how history works. That reality is part of what drives efforts to create memorials and museums, says Amy Sodaro, a sociology professor at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, who studies them.

Having experienced 9/11, she herself initially thought it “would shape the rest of my life and the society that we live in,” she says. But other events, political shifts, and major changes that have taken place in the years since made a difference as well.

It’s “these other geopolitical events and changes to our world,” she says, “that have changed the face of 9/11 in historical memory at the collective level — and I think also at the level of individuals.”