9/11 and Gen Z: How a generation copes with a tragedy that happened before most were born

My mother, four months pregnant with me, woke up to a clear blue sky. She wore heels to work. She had an important meeting at her office, just across the Potomac from the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.

“I remember that morning, thinking, ‘What a beautiful day,’” she tells me.

Then her mother called. Someone had flown a plane into the Capitol, she said.

My mom was confused and didn’t believe her.

It turned out my grandmother was wrong about the Capitol, but then my mother started hearing the reports: Planes had crashed into both the twin towers and the Pentagon.

My father was two blocks away from the White House at the time. Both the White House and the Capitol were potential targets of Flight 93, which ultimately crashed in Pennsylvania.

At his office, my dad watched a video feed on TV of the White House with smoke from the Pentagon in the background.

Everyone has a connection to 9/11. Mine are loose, of course — I wasn’t born until five months later, in February.

My parents tell me people were buying gas masks in a panic that day. My mom, pregnant and in her meeting heels, walked 5 miles home with my dad and a few friends because they were too afraid to go on the Metro, fearing they could get stuck underground.

My mom says she still gets nervous when she’s on planes, or when she sees an aircraft fly over D.C.

As for me, I am one of the first members of a generation who will remember the tragedy of 9/11 not through the lens of traumatizing memory, but as history.

The country I grew up in has been at war my entire life, and I and others my age, have grown up without a sense of peace because of an event we weren’t even there for.

I have never known what it’s like to go through airport security without taking my shoes off and my laptop out of my bag.

At every college football game where military aircraft do a flyover, my mind automatically turns to thoughts about what would happen if a bomb was dropped into the stadium.

My fellow Gen Z-ers are so used to war and thoughts of terrorism that it’s just second nature.

Throw in the domestic terrorism, gun violence and school shootings that we’ve been exposed to since grade school, and the childhood innocence that previous generations may have felt never really existed for me and most of my friends.

When I started learning about 9/11 around third grade in my social studies class, my parents gave me an edited rendition of their experience.

I was still in third grade on May 2, 2011, when people began celebrating the death of a man I’d never heard of before — Osama bin Laden.

I remember feeling confused and scared. I thought, why did everyone hate this guy so much? Even the president was mad at him.

He must have made some reeeeally bad choices, my 9-year-old self decided.

My teachers explained to us that this man was responsible for the deaths of a lot of people in our country. It unnerved me to learn that there was a group of people I’d never heard of who wanted to kill innocent people, who crashed airplanes into things.

As I’ve gotten older my parents have disclosed more details about their experience, each time leaving me with a clearer picture of what that day was like.

I’ve also watched dozens of documentaries and heard dozens of personal stories from teachers and guest speakers about their connection to 9/11.

Whether it was the story of a lost friend, coworker or relative — most of my teachers had a lot to say about the impact it had on them.

But I couldn’t wrap my head around the grief. It was history, not a memory, and secondhand stories and long documentaries had many of my peers falling asleep.

Then, while visiting a museum in Washington, D.C., during my sophomore year of high school, I heard a recording of an “I just want you to know” phone call from a man on the plane to his wife.

It was the first time I could wrap my head around the depth and tragedy of 9/11.

My heart sunk and I felt lightheaded as I listened to the audio. Though you could tell the man was on edge, it was a voicemail not unlike one my father would have left my mother on his way home from work.

In a journalism class my freshman year at the University of Maryland, we examined the ethics of publishing a photo of a man leaping out of the World Trade Center. You probably know the one.

I felt a knot in my stomach sitting in the lecture hall as I thought about a man forced to choose between leaping to his certain death or dying inside a burning building. The photo, to this day, weighs heavy on my heart.

With every year that passes, I learn more and more details about 9/11 and its impact from the tributes, “where are they now” articles and more.

Learning about 9/11 as history has created a lot of cognitive dissonance in my life. The attack was not during my lifetime, but its effects are still all around us.

People my age, my peers, my classmates, are now old enough to have fought in the war that started because of something that happened before they were born.

Many of my fellow Gen Z-ers mourn loved ones, family friends or relatives who did not survive, from my great aunt’s nephew to a close friend’s firefighter uncle.

We’ve learned about bits and pieces of that day from teachers, parents and grandparents — putting the puzzle pieces together to create a mental picture of what the nation might have looked like on that day.

Members of older generations say that after 9/11, our country was more unified than ever. But if we were really that unified, why did hate crimes against Muslims spike? Why did we spend years sacrificing young soldiers in a war that the American public was growing increasingly frustrated with?

Every year on 9/11, from grade school on, our class would observe a moment of silence. The way my teachers explained the attack to us felt much more personal, much sadder than any of the tragedies that 9/11 is typically compared to — like the attack on Pearl Harbor or the Kennedy assassination.

The difference, I guess, lies in the fact that it could have been any of us. It could have been my dad calling my mom from the plane. It could have been a cousin jumping from that window. It could have been a family friend who died in the collapse.

My mother tells me that after 9/11, she was terrified of what kind of world she would be bringing me into. She said she considered moving away from the city to protect her family.

But as we all know, life goes on and we learn to adjust.

Those adjustments have a price. Between the pandemic, climate change, systemic racism and a seemingly unfixable political divide, it’s easy for me and other members of my generation to feel as though we have inherited a world full of fear and violence. It’s quite literally all we have ever known.

But my generation is not one to shy away from facing these issues. We are the social media generation, and we know how to mobilize, protest and vote.

We’re finally adults, a new generation of leaders, and I have faith that despite the dark days of our youth, we will take over the world full of motivation to rebuild it into one where our children can enjoy the innocence we never had.

Grace Yarrow is a student in the Phillip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. She recently worked as an online producer for The Press Democrat.