Illustration by Lexi Ocampo

Editors’ note: Opinion articles published by The Watchdog provide perspectives of the writer separate from general Watchdog reporting.

Point-blank, the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks are a national tragedy. 2,977 individuals – victims – died during the attacks. Nothing can bring those people back. 

I can respect the memory of the individuals, empathize with them and their families, but alas, I did not know those people. That doesn’t mean that I cannot empathize with the magnitude of needless loss of human life. I’ve never been to New York, let alone New York City. I didn’t watch it live. I don’t have a story to retell each year of where I was when it happened. I wasn’t even alive when those planes careened through the buildings.

I also wasn’t alive during the attack on Pearl Harbor. I didn’t know a single one of the victims – 2,403 Americans – but I can still respect the sacrifice those people made.

History is constantly being written. Most things will be purged from the final edition of the proverbial book of the entirety of (contemporary) human history by a disgruntled copy-editor. A small number of things will have the luxury of being put into a footnote. An even smaller number of things will become sentences on recessions, paragraphs on anthropogenic climate change, and chapters on wars.

The almost-dry pool of remaining events will have cover-to-cover books written about them, or, if one book isn’t enough paper for the depth of the event, there will be a collection of books on that event, only that event, nothing besides that event.

Europe’s colonization of the Americas is one of those events. World War II is one of those events. Sept. 11 is one of those events.

None of these events can or should be forgotten, regardless of how long has passed since said events’ original date. It would be downright disrespectful to do so, both for the people who lost their lives and as a matter of not repeating the mistakes of the past.

Our collective consciousness will not forget. And yet, history is constantly being written. There will come a time when everyone who lived through those events will be dead and we will only know of the aftereffects.

A butterfly flaps its wings on one side of the Earth; a tsunami strikes the other. The butterfly has no intention of causing a tsunami, not in the slightest. The people, though, will remember the tsunami more than the butterfly. The next generation will remember the stories that people told about watching that wave strike their homes. They will also see the aftermath of the way that the city they lived in changed during reconstruction, even though they did not live through the event.

Enter Gen Z. In elementary school, my teachers told me stories of where they were during the Sept. 11 attacks. I remember them telling me the world felt like it stopped. I remember them saying they had never felt America so united. I remember them telling me the country entered a state of mourning in the immediate aftermath.

I never felt that feeling of America being united. Genuinely, I have never felt it. I don’t think I ever will. Around the time my brain began to understand the most basic complexities of politics, Donald Trump was elected for the first time. I’ve never known a non-divided, politically respectful country.

Be that as it may, let me clarify my point a bit real quick: I can conceptualize and mourn the massive loss of life from Sept. 11, but still, I feel the ramifications of it more.

My lack of privacy – regardless of my supposed right to it – has a direct line to Sept. 11. It’s entirely unfair to say that my privacy was stripped from me solely because of the terror attack, but the fear and vitriol that came with an attack on American soil is what started a chain reaction (in tandem with the advent of certain technologies) that led to every single thing that I do, every place that I go, every person that I talk to, every store that I spend money at, being recorded and logged and placed in a file that documents my entire life that I am not allowed to see.

About a decade after Sept. 11, ex-technical chief for the National Security Agency, Brian Snow, sat down for an interview with The Telegraph.

He said the reason the NSA began to overstep so much after the terror attacks on Sept. 11 was because of the pressure from the people of the United States to protect them from it ever happening again. Everyday people like you or me were scared to the point that they would go up to Brian and ask him – beg him – to keep them safe. 

“They were feeling very threatened,” Snow said. “Even at that time, I would tell them, ‘Back off, you don’t know what you’re asking for. It is not a straight line from surveillance to liberty. It’s a very complex process, and there are many other paths that can be taken that may not impact as much.’”

The attack and the fear that followed allowed the NSA’s process for collecting and analyzing electronic signals and communications, SIGNIT, to be turned on its own people. Previously, it was only allowed to look outward; it could only spy on and surveil other countries. Now, because of the level of fear, the American people were OK with the camera being turned on themselves, just to make sure there weren’t any profligates in our borders planning their next move.

What they didn’t account for, unfortunately, is that when the camera looks through our crowds of people for bad guys, it’s still recording all the good guys too. And give the government an inch, they’ll take a mile. We don’t know how much money the US intelligence budget allocates to the NSA (or to any intelligence entity, for that matter); it’s classified material.

Actually, most of the information on the organization that surveils us is under lock and key itself. We don’t know how many people work at the NSA, how many satellite offices it has, what it actually watches for, or how much it monitors the average US citizen. What we do know, though, is that all of those most certainly increased as the so-called War on Terror ramped up in the early 2000s.

In that same vein, the Aviation and Transportation Security Act passed on Nov. 19, 2001, and created the Transportation Security Administration and paved the way for the Department of Homeland Security and . . . Kristi Noem.

Fastidiousness aside, the TSA’s creation has been a mixed bag when it comes to effectiveness. The Department of Homeland Security sent some guys out to pretend to be terrorists and try to smuggle guns and bombs onto planes. 67 of the 70 times they tried, they got them through. But me and my metal water bottle- no. If there’s water in it, it could secretly be mega-anthrax or super-cyanide. Gotta dump that out, for the safety of God and country.

Going through an airport security checkpoint is the closest we can get to being in the seventh circle of Hell. If we were in church, I think that would get a hallelujah bellowed from the congregation. A fear of another terror attack is the reason that pitchforks line the walls and demons dance across the linoleum. That’s why we deal with the inconvenience of crossing a TSA checkpoint, even though it has been, at best, a marginally beneficial change for American security.

Ditto the NSA; we don’t know if their surveillance has made a legitimate difference in the security of Americans or in stopping terrorist threats domestically. We might know if the government was even slightly transparent, but that’s wishful thinking.

Back to home base: I didn’t live through Sept. 11. I don’t remember the days or weeks that followed in the aftermath. All I can say through my own anecdotal evidence is that the aftermath – the changes to policy or psychology or any other thing that was affected, big or small – I have, for certain, felt those effects.

And that’s why I say that Gen Z, the generation that can never take anything seriously, doesn’t care about the actual event of Sept. 11. We (or at least those who are politically conscious and upset about the state of everything) have felt and understand firsthand the government crackdown, the lack of neighbor-to-neighbor trust, and the toe we keep in the Middle East; I have experienced and felt all of that.

That’s the part of Sept. 11 that I can vouch for, and that’s the part that I think of first.