Maranatha
Students today don't remember 9/11, or the brief moment of unity we had thereafter - they'll remember something else.
I was a college student in 2001. I remember being woken up on a bright Tuesday morning in September by one of my roommates. He was on the phone with his dad; someone had taken out the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
We scrambled down stairs, switched on the TV, and gaped at what we saw. It was unbelievable. Surreal. I remember more than one person saying that it was “like watching a movie.” Then we saw the towers fall and we all knew, somehow and in ways we couldn’t possibly foresee at the time, that the world was different.
In some parts of the world, that terrible day was a cause for perverse celebration. A blow had been struck against the Great Satan, and some who hate America danced with glee at our suffering. But all across America, a strange and very different thing happened.
You might not believe it if you weren't there, but for a few short weeks, the entire nation was united. We were united in grief and sorrow and righteous anger. And there was some bravado and defiance, too. But more than anything there was a palpable sense, a seemingly universal sense, that we Americans needed one another, that we ought to look out for one another.
I thought of all of this Thursday morning as my commute took me past the Pentagon on the 24th anniversary of 9/11. Our world and our nation have changed tremendously in the past two dozen years. Not necessarily for the better. In some ways the change has been decidedly for the worse. The sense of national solidarity dissipated long ago, but many of us still remember it – a ray of light and hope among so many dark memories from that time.
And I thought of this, too: There is now a generation of young Americans for whom the assassination of Charlie Kirk will always loom larger in their collective memory and imagination than 9/11.
Students now in high school and college don’t remember seeing the World Trade Center collapse. They don’t remember the days of eerie silence when all domestic air traffic was grounded. Nor have they ever experienced anything like that all-too-brief sense of unity that spread across the nation.
But many millions of young people have seen those horrifying videos from Utah. And they’ve seen the senseless violence cheered, not by ragged mobs of America’s enemies half a world away, but by their fellow Americans.
Understand me: my point is not to compare the scale of evil perpetrated on 9/11, when thousands of innocents were killed in cold blood, to the gruesome killing of one man. My point is that Kirk’s murder has the potential to galvanize a generation.