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19 Years On, Does a Post-9/11 Generation Remember the Attacks?

Leslie Bonilla

   The morning of September 11, 2001, is one of Aidan Thayer's first
   memories.

   He was just 3 years old when the terrorist group al-Qaida launched a
   series of four coordinated attacks against the United States using four
   hijacked passenger airplanes. Two of the planes crashed into the Twin
   Towers of New York City's World Trade Center. While a third was flown
   into the Pentagon, the Department of Defense headquarters, near
   Washington. Passengers on the fourth plane, likely bound for the White
   House, retook control of the aircraft and crashed it into a field in
   Pennsylvania.

   Thayer's mother picked him up from preschool in the middle of the day,
   frantic.

   She drove to the family home in Springfield, Virginia, a 15-minute
   drive from the Pentagon. She set Thayer in front of the TV while she
   desperately attempted to call his father, Bradley Thayer, who was
   working at the Pentagon that day but evacuated successfully.

   "There was this one shaky cam, grainy footage, of the second plane
   hitting the second tower '¦ constantly on the news," said the younger
   Thayer, now 22. "I just remembered that clip looping over and over
   again, of just seeing the second plane, not very far away, hitting the
   tower."

   That day, 2,977 people died, as did all 19 of the al-Qaida hijackers,
   in the single deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

   Nineteen years later, Thayer is a fifth-year undergraduate student at
   Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, where he triple-majors in
   physics, mathematics and German. Thayer, despite his near-photographic
   memory, can only recall some scenes from the day of the attacks.

   For older Americans, in contrast, 9/11 remains a vivid memory. Ten
   years later, 97% of Americans 8 or older at the time could remember
   exactly where they were when they heard the news, according to a
   [1]2011 survey by the Pew Research Center.

   For many young people, though, 9/11 is a subject learned secondhand.

   "It feels like something that we learned in history books, something
   like World War Two," said Christina Liu, 22, from New York City. Liu
   graduated from New York University last year and will start work this
   month as an associated development operations engineer at Veeva
   Systems, a cloud computing company in California.

   "It seems very distant to me, despite being an event that happened in
   my lifetime," added Liu, who found she couldn't distinguish her
   memories of 9/11 from her memories of a massive 2003 power outage
   dubbed the Great Northeast Blackout.

References

   1. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2011/09/01/united-in-remembrance-divided-over-policies/

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