September 11, 2001

Today is September 11, 2026. It's the 25th anniversary of the Islamist terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people when hijackers flew passenger jets into the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon. A fourth flight crashed in Pennsylvania when passengers resisted the hijackers.

I've talked about people talking about 9/11. I reviewed conspiracy movies like Loose Change and 911: In Plane Sight, as well as Lawrence Wright's book The Looming Tower, about the failure to prevent the attack. But I haven't talked directly about 9/11 on this blog, even in an anniversary year like 2011, although at that time I was hardly writing, anyway. But in this milestone year, it seems apropos.

9/11 is to my generation what the JFK assassination or the moon landing was to my parents': it's that moment when you can remember exactly where you were and you realized you were witnessing world-changing events.

When the planes actually struck the Twin Towers, I was en route to work—already late. When I arrived at the office, the first thing my boss said to me was that I needed to check out the TV in the break room. The TV was on, but I was the only one there. I arrived just a few minutes before the collapse of the north tower. The south tower was already gone, but this wasn't clear to me yet until the second tower fell and there was nothing left.

I didn't get a lot of work done that day. I had never experienced that kind of pure horror before; nor have I since. What I had witnessed was the mass death of 1,700 people in the north tower (as we would learn later) not to mention the thousand that had already died in the south tower half an hour earlier. Finding out later, when I got home, what had also happened in Washington and Pennsylvania only intensified that horrified feeling when I realized the fuller scope of what had taken place.

I was in Ottawa, 400 miles and a whole other country away from New York. I'm sure that my circle of acquaintances, personal and online, is probably large enough that at least one person knows someone who was killed on 9/11. But I have no personal stake in the attack.

But it was the single largest loss of life on American soil due to enemy action, surpassing even Pearl Harbor. As a speaker I heard said a few weeks later, moral relativism was dead. (And it was, at least briefly). We had witnessed an act of pure, objective, evil, unsurpassed before or since in my lifetime. "Never forget" is the motto. And may I never forget.