A post-9/11 world of security strictures and surveillance endures
A quarter of a century after the Sept. 11 attacks, the effects linger. AP writer Deepti Hajela writes that everyone lives in a post-9/11 world, “with its security strictures and surveillance” — but that Americans do not all live in the same one.
In the reflection, published by the Associated Press ahead of the 25th anniversary of the attacks, Hajela observes that what the attacks and their aftermath have come to mean is not a single viewpoint shared by everyone; the reasons, she writes, are chronological, political and personal.
The account begins on the morning itself: on a sunny September morning 25 years ago, planes crashed and buildings fell in downtown New York City, rural western Pennsylvania and just outside Washington, D.C.
The shock waves of dismay and grief went far past those places, radiating through every part of the United States in communities large and small. The attacks tore at Americans’ sense of safety and their place in the world, and hearts were broken across the nation — not just those of people who lost loved ones but those of strangers who mourned for them.
The attacks, Hajela writes, left no one unaffected in “an unwanted moment of horrifying togetherness.”
A quarter of a century later, in Hajela’s telling, that shared moment has not produced a shared meaning. She describes the result as “a tapestry of meaning and grief as varied as the nation in which 9/11 took place.”