I don’t remember 9/11—I was two years old, at the time—but I can tell you where I was, where each member of my family was, and where nearly all of my former teachers were when the first tower was hit.
I can tell you how they gasped when they thought the plane crash was an awful accident, and I can tell you how they cried and clutched each other when, seventeen minutes later, they realized they were witnessing a terrorist attack.
I can tell you what it looked like when the towers fell—starting in second grade, my teachers screened the footage in class every year—and I can even tell you what it would’ve been like to live tweet the attacks (had Twitter been around in 2001), thanks to a college assignment.
Sometimes it feels like I remember 9/11, even though I don’t. This is a fairly universal phenomenon among Gen-Z-ers; in a viral TikTok posted last month, a 22-year-old named Amanda spells it out.
“We’re the first generation to not remember 9/11, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t affect us severely,” Amanda says. “Yeah, 9/11 happened in 2001. But it also basically happened every year afterwards, because the older generation was so obsessed with remembering their trauma.”
It makes sense that people want to memorialize the lives that were lost, she continues, but maybe we should draw the line at forcing elementary schoolers to “sit down every September and watch people jump out of burning buildings.”
In a recent Verge article, technology reporter Darryl Campbell makes a similar argument about the downsides of fixating on 9/11, but he’s not talking about schools—he’s talking about the TSA.
Campbell’s story opens with the most insane lede I’ve ever read—suffice to say, even death won’t prevent you from a TSA pat-down—and then digs into the agency’s history.
“[The TSA] remains institutionally obsessed with ‘preventing another 9/11,’ using that phrase like a reflex in press releases, Congressional hearings, and pretty much any attempt to justify its increasingly baroque policies,” Campbell writes. “In the last 20 years, it has spent nearly $140 billion to 9/11-proof air travel. But the reality is that TSA has played next to no role in the biggest counterterrorism stories of the past two decades.”
What the agency has done, Campbell continues, is employ a massive group of low-wage service workers who, while being tasked with “the regular harassment of ethnic and religious minorities and gender nonconforming people,” are also prone to assaults from aggravated travelers.
“We can no longer focus only on preventing the bad guys from getting into the secure area of an airport,” one TSA Administrator tells Campbell. “We must focus on both sides of the checkpoint.”
In his compelling exposé, Campbell subjects the TSA to the same scrutiny it inflicts, hurling the agency into its own X-ray machine and raising the question: if the TSA isn’t making travelers any safer, what is the agency but yet another displacement of the country’s collective grief?
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