I was a few months after officially turning seven-years old when the hijacked airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center. I remember it vividly. The year prior, my parents took us to visit family in Eastern Pennsylvania, and took a day trip to New York City that included escalator and elevator rides to the top of the South Tower at the observation-deck. The fresh-memories from that trip and the repeating television images of the collapsing skyscrapers stayed with me as I watched the CBS News that morning eating a bowl of Cheerios, and all throughout the day.
From President Bush addressing the New York crowds from the Ground-Zero rubble, the speech to Congress declaring a “war on terrorism,” to mainstream America’s introduction to Osama bin Laden, and onward to invading Afghanistan and Iraq and Saddam Hussein’s entrance to the news-cycle, I remember the events and evolution of those early years relatively well compared to many of my fellow, younger millennials. And what I’d describe as the zeitgeist of the early-2000s, from what I can recollect, was this sense that we’re always one step away from a crisis - this underlying vulnerability, paranoia and anxiety which served as the underbelly carrying all the way up to today.
It’s perhaps ritualistic and expected to complain about the polarizing, dystopian quality that, so far, marks the 2020s—as a contrast to the days and weeks following 9/11 as some special, magical yet myopic time when “all of us came together (as most “rallies around the flag” tend to do). The truth is that this effect works especially potently if and when an enemy is clearly recognized. Sure, we recognized al-Qaeda, Osama ben Laden and Saddam Hussein as "the bad guys” who needed the deserved vengeance as only a Texas cowboy of a president à la John Wayne can muster. But the days following 9/11 was when conservative pundits and televangelists had first colored my conception, let alone introduced me, to the word, “Islam.”
The year 2001 saw an exponential increase in hate-crimes towards Muslims and Sikhs that forever shifted from its prior levels pre-9/11. The Islamophobia and fear of anyone dark-skinned enough to look Middle-Eastern descent forever shifted national attitudes toward Muslims that helped fuel the ascent of Donald Trump’s presidency. It was Trump, after all, who gained political prominence in the early 2010s with his claims that President Barack Obama might have been a Muslim born in Kenya, and his 2015 campaign promises to “build the wall” and enact a Muslim travel ban.
Looking back, it seems miraculous to think that a biracial man from Chicago with “Hussein” as his middle-name reached the Oval Office, let alone winning with an almost 53% of the majority-vote in his first election. The failures of the Iraq War and the 2008 Great Recession, undoubtedly, created the political environment conducive for “Change We Can Believe In” to resonate with Americans and prevent the islamophobic claims about Obama enough to keep him from the White House.
In some ways, each president that comes into office has some defining inverse characteristic(s) when compared to the predecessor. For Obama, he was the cool, calm and collected analytic with a Shakespearian erudition compared to Bush’s quirky and faux-pas laden vernacular. Trump’s brash and tough-guy antics, ostentatious speeches and tweets, and off-the-script speaking style signifies him as the anti-Obama almost perfectly. For Joe Biden, one notable trait made him contrast with Trump in such a way that Trump’s lack of it might have been his Achilles’ heel, especially at the end of the 2020 election during a time of racial-strife around policing and a deadly pandemic that’s still raging — empathy.
I first noticed this cultural pursuit for empathy in pop psychology when someone sent me a link to Dr. Brené Brown’s TED-talk on vulnerability back in college. Brown, a professor and scholar in social-work whose expertise is on empathy and vulnerability, became a prominent expert of social-relations in the 2010s, and, I believe, a huge paradigm-shifter in how Millennials (and now Gen Z) understand and interact in human relationships today. Brown’s talks, along with the “self-care” movement, coincided with the rise of therapeutic-language currently overwhelming our day-to-day discourse.
Then, of course, was the reviving interest surrounding real and fictional white-male figures who display kind, gentle and wholesome attributes, such as Mr. Rogers, Bob Ross and currently Ted Lasso, American society in the 2020s seems to be seeking a soothing balm from the collective traumas of protests, riots, political upsets and insurrections — all within a pandemic that’s killed 600,000+ in a little less than 2 years. Albeit I would say that, even prior to the start of the pandemic, and even the Trump years, we’ve just been trying to heal from deep, lingering wounds that have gone unaddressed up to now.
President Biden ended the war in Afghanistan just a few weeks ago. During the Trump years, young people, especially Gen Z, have taken the lead in shaping activism through innovative, social-media practices to putting their bodies on the line. One interesting indicator for pop sociologists to differentiate Millennials from Gen Z is whether actually remembers (or was not born after) 9/11. Because I remember it well, I’m firmly in the younger, millennial camp.
What I’ve observed, from 9/11 to today, is that we’re scared. We’ve been scared. It’s no coincidence that Millennials and Gen Z have seen notorious increases of mental-illness cases, and 9/11 marked the moment in time when many of us either were introduced to, or born into, the concept that none of us are protected from societal calamity. But this also impels us to demand and work for fundamental changes from the grassroots on-up, and of course, allowing empathy to lead the way.