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We trusted each other at the time. Before the airline attacks. Those of January 1969, that is to say. Those who forced – at gunpoint – eight flights to Cuba. People sometimes forget that hijackings had become commonplace in the late 1960s and until the mid-1970s.
Once before that, when I was a kid, my grandfather took me and my first cousin to the national airport. I was flying back to Pittsburgh, and the families decided that my cousin would fly with me for a visit. Back then the fares were regulated, but the airlines – it was Mohawk, if I remember correctly – had what they called youth fares. My cousin was clearly a youngster. We hadn’t even reached the age of 11. But the ticket agent said she needed to see some form of proof.
So my rather wise grandfather took out of his wallet a school portrait of my cousin. On the back, he began to write, in a ballpoint pen, the name and date of birth of my cousin. Grandpop handed the fine print to the officer, with the ID now on the back. It’s going to do it, she said with a wink, and issued the youth fare ticket.
Back then, before the advent of magnetometers in 1970, you would walk into an airplane and sit down. Soon the flight attendant, as flight attendants were called then, brought in a tray of individually wrapped chiclets to help your ears decompress.
So if you are asking me what is the biggest change from 9/11, it is that we have taken one step closer to mutual trust. But the nation had already moved in this direction.
Millions of hours of airtime (including mine) Federal road) and millions of pages of retrospective have been devoted to the 9/11 commemoration ahead of tomorrow’s 20th anniversary. It’s Pearl Harbor Day of a new generation. To me, what started September 11 is more like the whims of Vietnam than the determination of WWII.
Compare Japan and Germany, West Germany anyway, 1965 and Iraq and Afghanistan 2021. In 1965, Japan had already hosted the Summer Olympics. Boys’ Life magazine featured swimmer Don Schollander on the cover. Germany’s economic miracle included the sale of over 325,000 Volkswagens to the United States. Literally everyone above a certain age has driven a bug at one point or another.
Iraq and Afghanistan, where are their miracles? Why here we are feverishly trying to get the cooperation of those considered a major factor of 9/11 in the first place! Great country if you like public flogging.
It is common to say how profoundly September 11 has changed the government. In a certain sense, this is true. Yes, there is the Department of Homeland Security – and the word “homeland” is becoming part of the American vernacular. But DHS was more of a conglomeration of existing departments than the creation of something new. The work of the Transportation Security Administration has certainly changed air travel and, to some extent, cruise travel. But the whole filtering mechanism is an extension of what had once been an increasingly strict regime.
Faith and confidence in the government increased after September 11. A lot of people left the farms and factories, so to speak, to join the civil service or the army. But it quickly turned into a historic descending curve. Obviously, the toxic partisanship between the people and politicians has not improved either. September 11 temporarily interrupted it, but it resumed within months.
Back to the idea of trust.
The security perimeter around federal facilities and the people who work there has been constantly shifting outward. Unfortunately, for good reason. The attempted assassination of Harry Truman in 1950 put an end to the idea of a president crossing the street. The Oklahoma City bombing of 1995 gave us more robust bollards and perimeter and entry security in general, and broadened the idea of what terrorists are actually capable of.
And what is perimeter security and entry control, if not the manifestation of what you cannot trust?
September 11 was cataclysmic in several ways. But he nailed the idea of trust on many fronts. This triggered a broadening and deepening of the culture of surveillance. This made people doubt the loyalty and motives of others.
The new One World Trade Center rose like a middle finger to terrorists. But not, in the American way, after five solid years of litigation. Nonetheless, it symbolizes the nation’s ultimate resilience. So there is a skyscraper in New York and a Taliban government in Afghanistan.
If September 11 has changed anything, it is in the psyche of the individuals directly involved. This is the case with disasters in general. But has that changed everything? I would say the jury is out.
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